Remote Project Management: 6 Helpful Tips and Tools

Effective project management has always made one of the most critical business processes in existence.

Granted, successful ventures are made by countless contributors and different facets. Still, no matter how good of an output we manage to produce at each of these instances, your project won’t be able to take full swing if poor management constantly creates bottlenecks and performance drops.

The modern business landscape that recently introduced the concepts of remote teams, contingent workforce, and telecommuting hadn’t made this critical issue any easier.

Even so, new challenges always give birth to new and more streamlined solutions and remote project management was very quick to pick up the cues and start adapting to this evolving situation.

Let us take a look then at a couple of tips, tools, and strategies that will help you come on top of these challenges.

1. Don’t lose sight of team building

Various forms of remote work offer numerous benefits with being able to work in a less stressful and more relaxed work environment always being cited as one of the prime mentions.

According to a recent survey, these feelings are expressed by as many as 87% of remote employees. But this distance can also create a deep sense of alienation and an inability to make cohesive teams with other remote employees.

Do your best then to double down your team-building efforts and make everyone feel like a part of the collective. Online team-building activities should do a good job filling in the time between these events.

2. Seat clear goals, milestones, and procedures

Remote work inevitably entails a lot of worker independence and reduces the manager’s ability to closely follow all relevant processes and provide timely feedback.

This situation can, of course, cause a lot of confusion, empty walk, and performance drops. This issue can be made considerably easier if you present your time with a very clear and unequivocal set of objectives, milestones that need to be passed to meet these goals, and procedures that need to be used along the way.

These solutions will make all future efforts far more synchronized and standardized eliminating a great deal of idling along the way.

3. Invest in management tools

After all, the tools always made the trade – in that regard, professional project managers are really no different.

As a matter of fact, the sheer range of responsibilities most of which include management of extensive sets of data and running processes that lend themselves to automation make utilization of professional project management tools an imperative rather than an option.

These software platforms usually include a vast set of features ranging from hiring tools to various dashboards, data analytics, process automation, and countless assets that make the managers’ duties simpler and more efficient.

4. Make communication simple and streamlined

Maintaining simple, effective, and streamlined communication is not that easy when people working on the same project are not physically present in the same room.

With that in mind, the role of a project manager should be to establish an effective communication infrastructure that will be able of mitigating this common issue through separated reporting channels, video conferencing features, assigning tasks and message priorities, and similar features.

Of course, once you manage to set up these foundations you will need to keep an eye on everything going on and moderate conversations in the right direction.

5. Pay attention to task prioritization

Doing more doesn’t necessarily mean you are bringing more value to the table. If you want to make sure the efforts of your team members truly count you need to steer them towards the tasks with the highest value and the highest priority.

So, your goal should be to first establish a clear way of ranking the task priority and assign each task you are delegating with some of these ranks so the remote workers know how to approach these duties.

If you have any doubts about how you should rank tasks by their priority you can resort to some tried and true method like Eisenhower Matrix or some other popular technique.

6. Offer clear and timely feedback

We have already briefly touched upon this issue but let us go into greater detail since clear and timely feedback makes the core of effective communication, sets foundations for more democratic corporate culture, and, most importantly, makes possible easier identification of improvement areas.

However, if you want to keep this blade sharp, the feedback needs to be delivered immediately, focus on outcomes rather than causes, use consistent standards, and be as honest as possible.

Also, make sure that the person on the other side has understood what you are saying and where your opinions come from.

We hope these few examples gave you a general idea about the tools and strategies you can use to make the management of your remote team simpler, more streamlined, and more effective.

The business world is constantly evolving and the remote position and contingent workforce are only some of the latest hurdles we need to overcome to bring ongoing projects to their timely completion.

However, by now we have become very capable of successfully dealing with these issues. The strategies and tools we listed above are only the tip of the iceberg but they should push you in the right direction.

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