Your team is struggling with time management. How can you use project management tools to help them?

1.Task Management: Break down projects into smaller tasks and assign to team members. Tools like Trello, or Jira allow you to create task boards where everyone can see what needs to be done and by when. 2. Prioritization: Use priority labels or tags within the project management tool to highlight tasks that are urgent. This helps teams focus on the most critical tasks first, improving overall time management. 3.Time Tracking: Integrate time tracking features into your project management tool to monitor how much time is spent on each task. This provides valuable insights into where time is being wasted and allows for better allocation of resources. 4. Deadlines and Milestones: Set clear deadlines and milestones for each task and project.

In my experience, to assist the team with time management, I involve them in defining the project scope and timeline using project management tools. I do this by encouraging open discussions to clearly understand project requirements and priorities. Breaking down tasks into manageable pieces collaboratively, using tools like Jira, ensuring everyone has a voice in shaping the project plan. This participatory approach fosters team ownership and a shared understanding of the scope, making timelines more realistic and achievable.

There is indeed an abundance of project tools available that have the potential to greatly assist our teams in achieving their goals and objectives. However, the mere availability of these tools is not sufficient for their effective utilization and integration into our workflow. The key lies in ensuring that these tools are applied appropriately, prioritized effectively, communicated clearly, and complemented by adequate training initiatives.

Enfrentar desafíos de gestión del tiempo en mi equipo ha sido un recordatorio constante de la importancia de herramientas efectivas. Introducir herramientas de gestión de proyectos ha sido un cambio clave. Con plataformas como Trello y Asana, hemos creado tableros visuales que desglosan tareas, plazos y responsabilidades. Esto no solo ha mejorado la organización, sino que también ha fomentado la colaboración al proporcionar una visión clara del progreso. Además, integrar calendarios compartidos y recordatorios automatizados ha optimizado nuestras operaciones diarias. La inversión en estas herramientas no solo ha mejorado la eficiencia, sino que también ha cultivado un ambiente más equilibrado y centrado en el bienestar del equipo.

AI can accelerate many manual and mundane steps in SDLC such as requirement gathering, test case generation, assessing the coverage of a design document to functional and non functional requirements, monitoring the productivity of developers continuously and providing insights and recommendations etc. Also, security and compliance monitoring can be automated with the use of right AI tools. The new generation Co-pilot tools such as GitHub copilot helps developers in generating unit tests and code recommendations. Besides all these AI is helpful in customer ticket prioritization and management. Gen AI has the capability in all these scenarios.

Project Management Tools like Asana, Monday, Trello, JIRA, Microsoft Project, ClickUp etc offer efficient & effective ways to segregate and plan work in ways which ensure optimal resource utilization & high productivity. Important : ? It is crucial to use at least 2-3 estimation techniques while performing effort estimation like Bottom up, Top-Down, Parametric, Three Point, Expert Judgement etc. ? Few tasks can be executed in parallel where others have a defined predecessor. Project/Program managers should ensure that both iterative and incremental approaches are applied while scheduling Tasks/Subtasks which would help products/services to reach faster to market. Quality is as important as Quantity!

In my opinion, while agile tools are great way to track sprint execution, it is not a great tool to create project plans and track schedule, resource loading, effort variance and projected completion date. With the advent of Agile, project teams have gone away from making project plans and tracking them as we do in MSPs. I recommend using MSProject tool in addition to agile tool so that we bring in science and engineering into the overall project planning and monitoring. Definitely a must haves for Fixed Price/Scope engagements.

- Replace Scope with a backlog - give the most important feature to the team to solve and trust them to solve it - throw the schedule away, it is a guess at best, based on thumb suck assumptions. - Just start something, learn something, collaborate, deliver, reflect and adjust. … no management required.

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Breaking down a project into small, manageable parts not only enhances the understanding of the broader vision, but also greatly assists in the planning stage – this includes estimation, delegation, and follow-up.

You can break down your project into smaller and manageable tasks and assign them to your team members with clear deadlines and expectations.

Planning a project enables one to have a clear vision of what to do and when. It is necessary to not only understand how a project will be achieved, but also to know the different steps involved and the order in which they need to be tackled. Identifying the planning process also allows for quick updates to the global plan in case of a delay in part of the project, providing a more accurate achievement timeline.

You can estimate the resources, such as time, money, and people, that you need for each task, and allocate them accordingly to avoid overloading or underutilizing your team.

All of the above is absolutely true, but don’t skip this very important step: Face to face or camera to camera, meet regularly with your team, let meetings combine chit chat and work, and do it regularly. This allows for constant team based feedback that will unite your team and push everyone forward.

It is very important as a Leader to ensure that meetings and events are strictly time boxed. In absence of time boxing, we see a tendency to stretch and extend meetings without any conclusive value coming out of them. Also, all meetings should result in a value or a key outcome which members can align with the goal towards achieving business Agility.

You can monitor and control your project schedule, and make adjustments as needed to cope with changes, risks, and issues that may arise during the project execution.

??Help your team understand the importance of task prioritising. ??Set clear goals and deadlines (realistic deadlines). ??Break larger goals into smaller tasks. ??Give tasks to people based on their strengths and workload capacity. Empower them to take ownership of their tasks while providing support. ??Use tools like Asana, Trello, or Jira. ??Foster open communication within the team. ??Schedule regular check-ins: progress check, challenges, and feedback. ??Encourage team to block out specific times for focused work. (Minimise distractions, people cannot multitask and they shouldn’t) ??Monitor project progress and team productivity. ??Identify areas for improvement and adjust strategies. ??Lead by Example. Respect and loyalty are earned.

? Multiple meetings with different sets of members addressing the same issues at various levels can lead to inefficiencies. Identifying and eliminating such redundancies in the system can significantly reduce wastage of time, ultimately freeing up valuable time for team members. ? The considerable time invested in preparing various reports can be optimized by utilizing digital platforms to deliver information through both PUSH and PULL mechanisms. This approach not only enhances efficiency but also contributes to saving valuable time for team members. ? Well-defined "Inspect and Adapt" timeboxed cycles hold the potential to eliminate the necessity for additional meetings.

I strongly recommend to use GenAI tools to improve productivity across various SDLC life cycles. Define your SDLC use cases that can give you high ROI and implement.

One of the major reasons for challenges with time management is repetitive & monotonous tasks. This is quite common in the Services industry, apart from many other time management challenges. Some examples of repetitive tasks include sending out daily email updates, preparing presentations for reviews, checking system logs, etc. To solve this, I would do the following: 1) Gather metrics about the 20% tasks that are eating up 80% of time 2) Use automation: e.g. a simple template or a collaboration software wherein the team can update the status regularly from which automatic reports can be generated for updates or reviews. Build re-usable templates or intelligent AI-based tools to prepare reports and highlight key issues , risks, etc.