How can technology help you manage your project more effectively?

Project management is an arduous and often thankless task, often likened to keeping plates spinning or attempting to juggle far too many things. Luckily, there are many ways of making this a lot easier, especially when you consider the number of tech tools that are on the market that you can use to take some of the weight off your shoulders and make things run more smoothly.

However, it is hard to say which will be of use to you, and which would just be a waste of time, effort, and a good chunk of the project’s budget. Getting this right will take time – but there are some areas to look at first.

Scheduling software

It is not unusual in this day and age for your project team to have its various members dispersed throughout the country or even around the globe. With so many different time zones in play, organizing effective communication between all these parties can be the cause of one of your major headaches.

By using scheduling software, so that everybody knows when people are available, you can schedule meetings, whether they be face to face or online. This way, answers can be given almost immediately, rather than waiting 8 to 12 hours for somebody to get back to you – and then another 8 to 12 hours for you to communicate your response to them.

Data storage and backup

With a dispersed team, having access to data at all times from anywhere in the world is absolutely key. Before Cloud data management and security, this would have been virtually impossible without some unnecessarily long e-mail chains with attachments that could have potentially had four or five different versions of the same piece of work in circulation same time.

By putting everything online, everybody who needs to get hold of the files necessary to complete their job can do so, and those that do not cannot. It also makes storing huge amounts of data for a project much more cost-effective. You are not paying out for servers that you are only using to full capacity a few times a year.

API management

Regardless of what your project does, it is going to need to talk to other applications and software. This is done using something called APIs, and by finding effective API management solutions, you can take a lot of weight off your developer’s shoulders; instead, increase their productivity by having them work on the core project.

Doing this also reduces the number of ‘unknowns’ you might have in the project, which is never bad for any project manager.

To wrap everything up

While your exact needs will vary slightly depending on which project you are working on, some key areas are common to almost everything that you work on.

First of all, whatever you are creating will need to talk to other applications – so managing those is key. In addition to this, knowing when and where all the stakeholders in any project are available will help save wasted time. Poor communication – which of course, will be aided by access to data for everybody using a medium like the Cloud and can be worked on by many different participants concurrently getting all of this together can make the job of a project manager so much easier and give them greater peace of mind.