How Well Is Your Company Coping With Project Management During Covid?

Covid-19 has posed a challenge to many sectors across society and the economy. It has stressed health care systems to their very limits and has put millions of people out of work. And then there are the families who have had their lives turned upside down from the loss of a loved one. 

Not least among these challenges has been for businesses to not only survive the worst economic crash since the great depression, but for those that have to maintain their position. 

Since it came as a surprise, many companies are still struggling to adjust. How has your company handled the project management of their business? Surely, they think they are doing their best, but there are some ways that things could be improved. 

In this article, we will go over several ways that your company can get back on track and survive this Covid-19 era and get back to growth as soon as it passes. 

1. Adaption is the name of the game 

People often misinterpret the law of evolution as being the survival of the fittest thinking it means the strongest. What it really means is the species that can best adapt to the current environment is most likely to survive. In nature just as it is in business, the company that can adapt to an ever changing landscape is the most likely to come out ahead of the competition. 

The ability to adapt is crucial in any period, but it has never been more essential than during a global pandemic where we have seen the second quarter GDP of the US drop by over 30%. 

How can your company adapt? The first is to implement an effective project management system. With more companies relying on remote workers, this is the time to have a system buttoned up and able to adapt quickly. 

Your project management system needs to be able to quickly and accurately assess the risks that lay ahead and to communicate to the team and stakeholders how best to proceed. 

Agile Methodology is one way that your company can move quickly and bring your project up to speed. There are a range of automated apps that can be used to streamline, but the main area where this can help is that it brings the projects to the customers much faster. Then, you can get feedback sooner from them and optimize the product accordingly. 

The idea is that your company should be responding to the customer needs and the environment that you are working within rather than following a set road map. There are going to be a lot of detours right now because of Covid-19 so moving forward without the ability to adapt is not going to work. 

2. Have closer goals 

Most companies have a target in mind and then strive to hit that target. It seems like the most obvious way to go, but when the target is far off it is easy to miss it.

A better way to go is to make smaller goals that will incrementally bring you to the target. This makes it far more flexible so you are always taking changes into account as you go. 

This is more efficient as each section or goal is much more manageable and can be done faster without sacrificing the quality of work being done. Then as each section is finished, you can make a determination on the next section based on the lay of the land at that particular time. You may find that the way forward is going to take a different route so now you’re not wasting time by having to backtrack. 

Since your workers are at home and lack the face to face collaboration these incremental steps can help to prevent any breakdowns in communication because of this. Though, you should be making an effort to schedule as many video calls possible to make sure that everybody is on the same page. This will also help to keep your staff morale up as they won’t feel so isolated and lack motivation as a result.

3. Centralize and share data 

To really streamline your remote workforce, you’ll need to make sure that everybody has access to all the data that they need to get the work done. Document and file sharing platforms are essential so that they are not having to double up on the work. 

These types of file sharing platforms will save time and money by keeping everything in one spot. 

Everything still hinges on managers being able to keep things moving and that everything works. They need to keep up on the status of the tasks being done and what has been completed or not. And the dashboard of the platform should always be up to date and kept clean. 

It’s the project managers duty to make sure that the tasks are being allocated correctly even though the process may have been simplified by using file-sharing software. 

4. Redefine your KPI 

How effectively your business is achieving its objective has likely changed during the pandemic. What used to take days, may now take weeks and that is even assuming some objectives are even still available to reach. It could be that some have been taken off the table completely. 

All of this means that your KPI likely needs to be redefined so you can focus on the objectives that can be reasonably achieved and how to know if you are on track to meet them. It’s important to have these KPI visualized in real time as things will be changing very quickly. 

This way, you always know exactly where each segment of the project stands in real time and thus the overall health of the project. With old KPI as your guiding force, you may find that your project is constantly missing the mark and start looking to place blame in the wrong areas when it was the KPI all along.

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