In our last blog, we shared part 1 of our talk, “Building a Better Death Star,” given at EMPOWER 2018. This blog will cover part 2, Imperial Best Practices: Managing Projects and Resources. It’s clearly an important topic. After all, you don’t build a moon-sized ship without knowing how to manage your projects and resources. We’ll highlight five tips here.
- Assign a single project manager responsible for the project plan
This should always be limited to a single person since bad things tend to happen with multiple owners. Now, that’s not to say everything should fall on one person’s shoulders. To prove that point, we’d like to call out a proven methodology we use that helps assign ownership for project tasks. It’s called the RACI Matrix, and it works like this:
- Responsible. Person who performs the task.
- Accountable. Person in charge of the result who makes sure the work is correct and has Yes/No/Veto power.
- Consulted. Person who provides info about what they're trying to get done in the task. This role often consults with the Responsible.
- Informed. Person who needs to be notified when something is complete, like an executive.
These assignments can help every project run more efficiently, so rely on Quick Base to help bring this matrix into real life.
- Use dashboards to make it easy for task owners to see task due dates and update their tasks
This one’s fairly self explanatory. Giving owners visibility in to the information they need enables them to be in the know so they can more effectively manage their tasks. - Use dashboards and baselines to make it easy for PMs to see how changes have affected the project timeline
This dovetails nicely with #2 above. Since no tasks exist in a vacuum, it’s important to rely on dashboards to give you insight into how modifications or adjustments to one task will impact subsequent tasks down the line. - Pre-schedule regular project check-ins with clients and task owners
We’ve succinctly summarized this as CRAP: Communication Resolves All Problems. By having project check-ins scheduled ahead of time, you can keep everyone accountable for hitting deadlines since they already know when they’re expected to give status updates. - Constantly review and update the risk mitigation plan
By constantly reviewing the risk of associated with your project, you can keep your team apprised of how you’re doing with regards to your risk management plan. Keeping risk at bay keeps you running as smoothly as possible.
Quick Base makes it really easy to follow these best practices. It’s so easy and intuitive to use, it’s hard to get outside the lines even if you wanted to. But best of all, you can build your own methodology into it.
In order to bring this all home, we suggest checking out QGantt, our web-based replacement for Microsoft Project management. Its drag-and-drop functionality lets you manage all of your stuff: critical path, scheduling, timelines, resource assignments, but does it YOUR way. You’d have to be a Rebel to want to use any other tool.
Be on the lookout for part 3 coming up next month.