Making Project Managers’ Lives Easier and More Productive Through Automation

Project management is a continuous struggle for balance between time, cost and quality. It’s no wonder why project managers want to make things more efficient and effective as possible.

Some may think manually creating a project plan is easy, since it’s formulaic. But if you ask any project manager, that isn’t necessarily always the case. There are routine processes that can be done without much thinking, yes, and this is where the opportunity for more time savings actually lies, as a good number of project management tasks and activities are routine in nature.

Project management and automation

The concept of automation is nothing new these days. Organizations, big and small, explore various software tools to streamline project plans and speed up execution.

Excellent project managers make a huge difference to the success of any project, and as John Berra, the retired Chairman of Emerson Process Management, is quoted on Automation World, the good ones are hard to find and once found, should be taken care of. Since they’re expected to perform various functions ranging from the routine to non-routine, it is best to make their lives easier by automating those that can be automated, leaving them with more time and mental energy for more knowledge-oriented work.

What can be automated?

The following are routine tasks that some project managers are still manually doing and are better off automated:

• Generate a project plan
• Prioritize tasks according to overall goals
• Notify team members about new tasks
• Plot member schedules and timelines to eliminate work overload and/or overlapping and ensure individual, team and project time goals are met
• Notify stakeholders about upcoming deadlines
• Notify concerned parties about finished tasks to reshuffle workload allocation
• Reschedule/rearrange tasks/timelines according to changes that happen in real time
• Generate reports
• Send status reports to relevant people every 24 hours

Thanks to technology breakthroughs, including the increasingly common availability of web server and network access, the ever-expanding growth of project management tools has afforded project managers the ability to simplify their tasks and operations through various functionality types that include:

• Project planning
• Resource allocation and scheduling
• Progress tracking
• Timesheet collection
• Team communication and collaboration
• Document management
• Change request and control
• Issues collection and management
• Quality control
• Scope change control and management
• Process management

How Comindware Project helps

Comindware Project is designed to automate various routine project management tasks to make the lives of project managers easier. The software’s automated priority-based planning feature lets project managers easily create project plans, schedule and arrange tasks through a visual drag-and-drop interface.

Once task assignments and priorities are defined, Comindware Project automatically generates a calculated project plan complete with resource leveling, manual task linking, auto notifications, and readjustments according to real-time updates.

Because it’s built on top of a social collaboration network, Comindware Team Network, employee engagement and productivity are enhanced, as work discussions reside in the same platform where work gets done. Unstructured group emails that clutter people’s inboxes and communication threads that keep people confused are eliminated, ensuring all parties involved in the structure, development and execution of the project know exactly what’s going on.

Conclusion

According to James Pennypacker, PM Solutions’ Center for Business Practices Director, cycle time, which is the time it takes to complete a project, is among the top 10 most important project management benchmarking measures. Cycle time completion efficiency has a huge impact to performance and is therefore a prerequisite to effective project management.   By making their lives easier through automation, extra time savings allow project managers to focus on the more creative, non-routine and knowledge-oriented aspects of their jobs, which is a boon to cost savings and project quality.
 

Maricel Rivera works as a financial researcher for a multinational financial firm. Outside of her full-time work, especially when the financial reporting season isn’t at its peak, aside from online marketing, she also does freelance writing, specializing in the business and technology field. One of the topics she has already extensively covered and keeps exploring is work management. She currently explores product development trends, contributes to www.cmwlab.com and provides tips for better use of Comindware Tracker workflow software