Effectively communicate with your team members.
Open communication and a sense of project transparency will help your team members as early as on the project estimation stage. While you shouldn’t expect your team members to come up with 100% precise estimates, the assumptions they provide need to be at least within the realm of possibility. How can you help? One thing project managers can do to support project estimation is to make sure that the team fully understands the project: business objectives, end-user needs, all functional and non-functional requirements. This should help your employees create more realistic estimates.
Identify the dependencies between tasks and roles within your team.
It’s one thing to keep in mind the dependencies between different tasks, but you also have to remember about the dependencies between different roles in the project. Your frontend developer will only be able to fully work on the project when the designer delivers their part. If one person is late with their tasks, other people may follow suit simply because of dependencies between their roles.
Make sure your team is aware of these dependencies. Such an awareness will help them make better decisions at the estimation stage and prioritize their tasks later on.
Collaborate with other project managers, communicate your intentions.
We’ve already mentioned that you need some visibility in the schedules of other projects at your company, especially if you’re using the same resource pool. But how can you get visibility into other people’s intentions? Let’s imagine you’re prepping for a new project and are about to assemble the team. You go through the list of employees and spot someone that would be a great fit. You decide to assign them to the project as soon as you get an official kick-off confirmation from the client. When that day comes, you’re in for an unpleasant surprise: another PM has already booked that employee for their project. If only you were able to “call dibs” on a particular makeup of the team...
With Teamdeck, you are able to communicate your intentions and book employees tentatively—just add a dedicated tag to your booking. You can also create custom tags to, for example, express different levels of urgency or confidence in a given booking. All in order to avoid conflicts with another project’s schedule.
Monitor the progress of your project.
Monitoring the project progress and reporting is a crucial part of project management: it allows you to keep stakeholders up to speed, but also better understand the health of the project yourself. Resource and project management tools, including Teamdeck, often enable you to create reports of project activities, time logged, resource utilization, etc. Use them to avoid having to adjust your schedule.
For example, you need to regularly check the actual time tracked by your employees and compare with the initial estimates. Is everything going more-less according to the plan? Great! On the other hand, a discrepancy between estimates and actuals may be an indicator of future scheduling issues.