At the end of the week your project will evolve, and the plan will be out of date. What will you do?
You have options:
- Do it yourself: update your project plan file manually every week.
- Delegate or use crowd sourcing: share your project plan file with your team and ask everyone to update their tasks status manually. It’s bad to switch from work to this excel file and is not working quite well.
- Automate: use work automation engine which makes it possible to update each task online by the one who is working on the task, and has all the information on task in a single place. This way, your project plan will be updated simultaneously with its execution.
“…Execution is the next step after planning and it includes process automation and task management.”
You’ve carefully thought your project plan through, set goals and deadlines. As usual, you are short of time, you need every single working hour badly to complete the plan on time. From this angle, seems like you are wasting time when you update your project plan manually.
Why manual updating of your project plan is evil?
1. Lack of integration.
Project consists of different parts. Planning is only one part of the project. Execution is the next step, which includes workflow automation and task management.
If all of them are managed in different systems, you won’t be able to avoid manual updating. Basically, in this case you do the job robots should do for you.
2. Lack of communication
If you use a desktop planning tool, you usually cannot (will not) share it with anybody. Your team cannot take part in upgrading real-time statuses of your project execution. In this case, the manager is the only user of the system. This can be solved by collaborative toolset inside of your planning execution solution. Or, as an option, you can share your plan online with your team.
“…with work automation engine, the problem of manual plan updates will be removed.”
Execute your plan and update it automatically with Comindware Tracker.
What my plan looks like in Comindware Tracker:
With Comindware Tracker the problem of project weekly manual update is solved:
- You save time on updating reporting;
- You can show your report to customers and superior managers at any time;
- You know what’s going on now;
- Each one on your team knows what is going on in the project;
- As a pleasant bonus, team collaboration enhanced.
Each team player has all the necessary information on tasks, including comments and history track, files and discussions, all in one place. The deadlines and priorities they set are immediately visible to the manager. Completed tasks and tasks that are in progress or deferred are updated online by the one who is working on the task. This collaborative update provides live-time visibility of the project plan execution.
What the manager, project manager, team leader gets: visibility on the project execution progress and live status updates:
You can see your project progress, statuses and current assignees. You can customize each list to show you the things you want to see, like status, deadline, current assignee, item ID, number of attachments, anything else. Customize it the way you want. The essential is that the information on your project is up to date here.
