The organization is the best way to successfully accomplish project-based work. It synchronizes your team, maps out a plan of action, gathers paperwork to one spot, and puts tasks in chronological order. Your team can produce quality and efficiency with reduced stress.
Everyone will know what their responsibilities are, no wires will be crossed, miscommunications made, or confusion present. So if you want to successfully tackle your next project, here are six of the best organizational strategies you should consider.
Assign a Facilitator
The creation of a project outline allows for planned progress. Assigning someone or something to facilitate that progress allows for application. A facilitator is essentially the middle-man that handles all the grunt work. They delegate tasks, establish communication, track progress, foster collaboration, and collect data. They are not involved in the work but the logistics. Every project needs a central hub, and although a team leader usually fills this positioning technology has created software to handle the task.
A program like taskworld, for instance, will create a central hub for your team. They can access information, communicate, collaborate, receive tasks, assign tasks, and store data. It takes care of tedious logistics so every member of the team can focus on the work itself.
Make A Map
A project management plan is a great way to organize your project from start to finish. Think of it as a travel itinerary. You already know the beginning and end of your journey, but you have yet to figure out how you will get there. A project management plan maps out each step you will take to get from point A to point B. It simplifies the entire trip by breaking it down into smaller portions. This allows you to generate strategy and approach the project with a plan of attack. All you have to do is start asking questions.
The best way to create a management plan is to answer all the pertinent questions surrounding it. What are the goals? What is the end result? How will we get there? What has to happen first? Answer these questions and you have a basic idea of your project’s requirements. You can outline every step you will take and then set your plan into action. Form there, all you and your team have to do is follow the map.
Set Milestones
Setting milestones is another great organizational strategy. It places more emphasis on the steps that must be taken to reach the end goal. Instead of being overwhelmed by the project in general, a team can apply focus on one aspect at a time. When this individual aspect is completed and goals are met the team gets to move on to another milestone.
From a team-building standpoint, milestones create a feeling of accomplishment and allow for incentive making. In terms of organization, they compartmentalize tasks and place project goals in chronological order. It allows for a smoother process, enhances quality, and ensures that no mistakes are made.
Communication
Factoring in how your team will communicate is another feature of effective organization. Mistakes can be made if teams are not synchronized. Let’s say you need permits to begin construction on a new building and you also need an actual construction company to do the work. One team member handles the construction company and one handles the permits.
Proper communication will see that the permits clear at the same time the construction company shows up. Improper communication could lead to a construction company showing up before the permits.
All that is needed to organize communication is a platform set aside for your team to talk through. This can be a linked email account, a smartphone app, or online software. Once it is place anything and everything that requires communication for the project runs through there.
Storage System
Every project will leave debris in its wake. Debris made up of emails, memos, forms, reviews, reports, etc. Often times paperwork like this contains important information regarding the project. Many teams have found themselves in a world of trouble because they lost documents. In order to avoid this, you need to find a storage system that will hold all the data generated by your project.
Anytime a message is communicated, a report is written, or a receipt is provided it goes into storage. Storage can be created via online software, hardware programs, outsourcing, or a central file documents are copied to. No matter how it is done the storage system ensures documents are kept and are easy to access.
A Calendar/Timeline
This is a very simple but very important organizational aspect. Every project will have a timeline full of deadlines that must be met. No matter how organized you are, no matter how well you plan, if you do not focus on deadlines you can be in a world of hurt. So always make sure you mark the important dates on a calendar.
You can even use interactive software to create notifications and warnings. Setting a timeline also factors in how long you expect a given part of the project to take. A milestone is not just based on what needs to get done, but how long it will take to accomplish it.