If you are a project manager working from home how can you know if your team have everything covered. Read on as we offer some helpful tips.
More and more companies are looking at ways to be more flexible. For many businesses, that means allowing employees to spend some of their working week in the office and the rest of the time working from home. Fortunately. this was a trend that was already taking place for a number of companies before the WHO declared the current coronavirus pandemic and governments placed countries into lockdown, forcing people who could to work from home to help reduce the spread of the virus. However, transitioning to working from home, especially as a project manager, isn’t as easy as you might think. When your team members are spread out all over the place it is important to be sure that the work is covered, and any issues picked up on as soon as possible.
Communication
One of the first things you will learn during project management training is that good communication is one of the key skills a project manager needs to have. This has never been truer than when a team are based all over the place and not together in a single office. Schedule small meetings, either with all of your team members or individual people on a regular basis. You might want to set up an online meeting option to do this. Make sure that the members of your team understand that you are still as available as you ever were and if they have any issues or come across a problem with the project you are available. However, it’s also important that you set boundaries for communication – you can’t be expected to take calls 24/7 or answer e-mails at 3am, so putting in place guidelines for when you’re available and how long people might need to wait for an answer will help to manage expectations of your team.
The right project management software
Choosing the right project management software is always an important consideration for any project; it is especially important when the members of your team will not be working in the same office.
If you have attended project management courses then you are likely to have touched on software and the type of features that you may find useful. Good software management will allow all the members of your team to post any necessary updates in real time so that everyone will know exactly what is going on. This will allow for any issues that have been identified to be seen by the whole team as soon as they have been found and worked on as soon as possible. When it comes to ensuring that the project is running as closely to schedule as possible this can be invaluable. If written communication is also conducted via the software then it is possible for everyone to see what was agreed to and more importantly which team member should be working on which part of the project, creating a “paper trail”.
With the right tools to hand there is no reason why as a project manager you couldn’t work from home whilst still ensuring that your team has everything covered.
