Project managers, how do you currently schedule your project timelines? Most likely you create a spread sheet or Gantt chart with each of your milestones mapped out. These charts are extremely useful in apportioning time and resource to each element of a project, as well as being able to estimate completion dates for each element and the project as a whole.
However, they hold a vast amount of information that can be difficult for someone who isn’t deeply involved in project management to follow. These individual documents are often held in one place which isn’t easily accessible for everyone involved in the project or those on the outside, and when milestones inevitably changes, it is difficult to communicate the updated time schedule to everyone involved.
Instead of struggling to communicate a complex schedule to many people on your own, you can use your enterprise social collaboration platform’s Events module to do it for you.
But how exactly can you use the Events module to boost visibility and transparency of your project milestones and help you with project management?
1. Make your team aware
You may spend hours constructing your project schedule down to every small element, but this isn’t helpful to anyone else unless you share it with them. Sometimes, team members (and you) and can lose track of their place in the plan, and schedules can slip. Create an event for each major milestone and these will remain permanently visible on your and your team members’ dashboards so it’s easy to see which short and long-term goals you are working towards. All events associated with your project can be grouped in a Category, so they don’t get mixed up with non-project events.
2. Get your milestones in calendars
In HighQ Collaborate, you can sync events with third-party calendar applications like Outlook or Calendar. This means that all your team can automatically add all of the project milestones to their personal calendars and these will be updated automatically if you need to change details of an event. Reminders can be set on calendar events, so your team will be kept informed of upcoming milestones.
3. Keep your team up to date
Time scales and deadlines shift in all projects – this is inevitable, particularly when working with contractors and outside collaborators. When your milestones get moved around, instead of rejigging your timeline spreadsheet and distributing an updated copy to your team, you need only edit the event and your team will be notified automatically. Only the event creator can edit an event once it has been posted, but you and your team members can comment on individual events to add additional information, express concerns and update on the status of the milestones.
4. Share more detail about milestones
When you create an event, you can elaborate on the details of the milestone far more than your spreadsheet will allow. Use the full WYSIWYG editor in Collaborate to create richly formatted text with links, tables, images, videos and attachments, so you can get as much information across as you need. Everything associated with the milestone can be stored with the event (or links to the content can be included) so it can be used as an easy-access reference point for you and your team.
5. Reflect on your project
The Events module on Collaborate has an Archives section which holds past events and all of the details associated with them. At the end of your project, you can look through the milestones of your project, identify where problems may have arisen, what successes you achieved. You can use these past events as a basis for your project report or present the archived events as they are as a breakdown of each stage of the project.
If you would like to know more about enterprise social collaboration and project management, please contact us.
