6 Tips for Improving Project Visibility and Control

How do you set your team up for success?

Project management is a huge undertaking and will require a lot of your time, effort and dedication. It’s important to provide your team with everything that they need to be able to accomplish your goal. Apart from your guidance and direction, you should also provide them with tools that will help your team keep track of their performance and any other tasks that they need to accomplish. At the same time, you as a project manager should be able to easily take control of the project and make sure that everything goes as planned. To do this, you need to have a project visibility plan.

What is Project Visibility?

Project visibility pertains to a team’s capacity to oversee their overall performance, including resource allocation and potential problems. With a good project visibility, you can ensure that everyone in your team has a clear visibility and understanding of your project goals, the roles that each member has to play, as well as the tasks that each of them needs to accomplish.

Benefits of Project Visibility

Providing your team with an efficient means for project visibility is a great way to set them up for success. Here are some of the benefits project managers can expect from providing their team with better visibility of the whole project.

• Save time and resources. Better project visibility gives everyone a clear perspective of the whole project and eliminates the instances of wasted time and resources which is usually due to having no clear direction.
• Better communication. Providing your team with better project visibility also eliminates the need for back and forth communications, which can be inefficient.
• Enhance output quality. Project managers who give importance to project visibility can also help their team accomplish their work with better quality.
• Improve team’s efficiency. Many project visibility tools are now available in the market, and have helped many organizations become more efficient and productive.
• Understand each member’s role. Better visibility of the whole project also allows everyone involved in the team to know who is assigned under each role and what task each team member is performing.
• Streamline team’s workflow. Project visibility tools such as Kanban, Scrum, Gannt charts, timelines and others can make it easy for teams to follow their workflow process.
• Improve decision making. With everyone having easy access to all important project information, it’s easier for each team member to make informed decisions and avoid committing costly mistakes.

6 Things to Do to Improve Project Visibility

With better project visibility comes better project management. This is why project managers should always be on the lookout for the best ways of boosting the team’s visibility of the whole project. Here are some things you can do to improve your team’s project visibility and control.

1. Setup a workflow dashboard

Knowing where to find information about your project workflow can provide your team the right direction and help them know what steps to take to complete their individual tasks. It’s important to make sure that each member of your team understands your workflow, and having a workflow dashboard available can help guarantee that. Using a virtual Kanban board is a good way to create a workflow dashboard. With a Kanban board, your team will have a better overview of all the pending, ongoing, completed, cancelled, and overdue tasks. Anyone in the team can easily create task and resource cards and assign them to a member of the team. This will help your team take action immediately based on what needs to get done as indicated on your Kanban board. As each task progresses, its corresponding card then moves from one process to another, until it reaches the completed column.

2. Implement a document management process

Running a project will require access to a large quantity of data and documents. And to help you improve your project visibility and manage your documents better, having a document management strategy is important. This allows you to centralize the storage of your documents and organize them for easy access anytime they are needed. You should identify who will take charge of organizing your documents and how each team member can gain access to them. You should also document your processes so that you will have a reference in case you need to train new team members or hand over the management of your project. Your document management process should also involve a purge process to help your team know when a document is unnecessary and what steps to take before deleting them.

3. Create a communication plan

An important aspect of project visibility that some team managers tend to neglect is establishing a concrete communication protocol. Communication is the primary means of engagement within teams and allows everyone to share their input for the success of the whole team. If there are no communication plans in place, it can affect the team’s collaboration and efficiency, impacting the project negatively. Your team should identify rules and procedures which everyone should follow when it comes to communicating with their teammates. Identify when an email is essential, when it’s okay to discuss something via chat, or when a video conference or meeting is necessary. This way, you get to maximize your team’s productivity and eliminate any unnecessary and time-consuming back and forth communication.

4. Make project goals visible to the whole team

Having a clear knowledge of your project objectives is also important. To make sure that your team has full project visibility and control, you should see to it that they have constant access to your project goals. You should start by creating SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-Based) goals. To display your goals and make it constantly accessible for everyone, your workflow dashboard, in the form of a virtual Kanban board can also be useful. You can set up a column for your team goals to make sure that your team is reminded of your goals every time they check your dashboard. This will help your team avoid overruns, misunderstandings, personality clashes, and missed milestones, and help improve the productivity of your team members.

5. Use collaboration and sharing tools

Whether your team works in an office-based, virtual or hybrid setup, it’s important to provide your team with a venue for efficient collaboration and sharing. For this, a virtual Kanban board can also be very useful. Other useful work tools your team can use include systems for time management, video conferencing, instant messaging, file sharing, project management, and more. These collaboration tools support project visibility and allow your team to take better control of your project’s progress.

6. Post updates regularly

As a project manager, your primary role is to provide your team with guidance and support. One way for you to do this is by giving your team regular updates of your project’s progress. It’s important that they learn how your team is doing in terms of accomplishing tasks and if deadlines and timelines are being met. It is important that they get frequent updates about the tasks that are completed, pending, urgent, or cancelled. This way, they will know where to focus on.

Better Project Visibility with Kanban

The successful completion of any project relies on the collaboration of the team handling it. Project managers should always see to it that the whole team has great project visibility throughout the project’s duration in order to take better control of its progress. If you are looking for a tool that will support your team’s collaboration and project visibility, check out Kanban Zone. This online Kanban board is the perfect collaboration and analytics tool for teams to constantly visualize workflow and take charge of their work dependencies better.