Benefits of Using a Project Management Tool for Your Small Business
Reading Time: 5 minutes Small businesses have defined goals and objectives that need to be met, as they determine the success of their business. So, to accomplish their goals, it is crucial to be efficient in all the processes they apply
Project management software is one such tool that helps them streamline their processes. The tool helps managers to keep costs in control and hit deadlines on schedule. It makes sure that you remain committed to the project and also track whether you are paid on time. Small business certainly needs efficiency to grow and make their business a successful venture. Here are some uses of management tools that will help you take your business to another level.
Table of Contents
Planning and scheduling
While you are managing a team, having everyone’s tasks and responsibilities outlined is very important. It helps promote transparency among the employees. Start by prioritizing your tasks, so it helps you in case some emergency arises. By using a planning tool that has scheduled time slots available, you can easily make room for urgent situations without much manual rescheduling and delay.
Having a planned calendar also gives you an overview of which of your team members are working on which specific project. A quick overview of everyone’s scheduled time and task milestones help you to set realistic deadlines and avoid any rush.
Multiple projects and task views
There are a lot of different people involved in your project, and each of them does things differently. Bearing this point in mind, you should allow the team members to work in their way and make changes to the tool in a way that suits them better.
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If a project management tool doesn’t offer customization features according to different projects at hand, then you are missing an essential component.
Collaboration
An important project requires a lot of people to work together, each having specific tasks that require expertise. So frequently, they also need to access each other’s work to keep the project running smoothly.
An excellent project management tool has features like file sharing, contact lists, and calendar management. The team members can quickly upload the file and other information so that rest of the team members can access it whenever they need to use the team dashboard. Some tools also offer a built-in chat feature that you can use to communicate with your team members easily.
Reporting
In order to grow your business, it is essential to know all the shortcomings and problems that you need to solve quickly. For this, you need two things first, an insightful report, and a KPI (Key Performance Indicators) dashboard. Some of the best project management tools are those that are capable of using the past inserted data and allow you to create customizable reports.
A project dashboard is the best and quickest way to keep track of your project performances. It includes vital matrics like planned project values, schedule variances, and the percentage of tasks completed.
Custom workflow resources
The ability to create custom workflow statuses is one of the essential features in your project management software. It helps you identify what tasks are under testing, which part of the project is in the review. It should be able to allow you to see in which stage your project actually is.
Also, the robust dashboard in your project management software can give you a glimpse of which of your tasks are on track, and even the status of the rest of the project workflow. This seems an elementary feature but seeing your tasks by their current state can reveal a lot of information, including:
- Is the project stuck or facing any problems?
- Does a step often gets skipped?
- Is there a problem repeating in any of the individual processes?
Automated task assignment
In small companies, the employees are often overwhelmed with more work. Therefore it may happen that a task may not find it’s way to the right person or gets stuck to the wrong person if it is not appropriately handled. If jobs are not monitored closely and appropriately, they can get stuck to the wrong desk for many weeks or even months.
Instead of finding the person supposed to handle a request, it is much more productive if you put it in your project management software. Suppose an employee is handed over a task to work on, but they are busy then the job can automatically be handed over to the employee in the list after him.
Resource management
When you are working on tight resources as most small businesses do, then you can’t afford to make any mistake that leads to the funds being wasted. Things like materials used in the project, time of the team members, and even meeting rooms are resources that need to keep track of.
A useful project management tool comes equipped with the resource management feature that keeps track of all the resources that you use and also calculates the cost of their use. This helps you avoid facing a situation such as overusing the resources or experiencing the lack of them. Also, as a project manager, you can assign specific resources to appropriate team members and ensure that the funds are utilized efficiently.
Conclusion
We have outlined all the benefits of owning a project management tool, but only when you try them yourself, you get a proper idea of the required features. You can check out the list of free open source project management tools we have and signup for them. Later on, you can build your own personalized software tool that is built to get the best result for your business.
Furthermore, it is essential to keep in mind that all the platforms that you use on trial bases will have many features and tools that you are not familiar with. That is why you need first to try them and check how they work for you. You can also let in your team members for trial, so they can get the chance to see the project management tools themselves and be a part of this critical decision making.
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