Bantter BlogBy Amanda Winstead
Project management is a dynamic process. It involves collaborators with diverse skills and needs, various tasks, and multiple goals. As a result, you can influence the success of your projects with equally dynamic resources. Visual tools are among those well worth exploring.
Visual tools are software platforms and documents that go beyond simple text descriptions, using shape, color, and images to improve organization and engagement, among other factors. There are various types available, each with the potential to positively impact your projects and team members. Let’s take a closer look at some you can consider adopting.
Kickstarting Ideation
Ideation helps your teams to establish a core focus for the outcomes. It’s also an opportunity to foster innovation, as it gives your staff a chance to work together on problem-solving that is influenced by their combined unique perspectives. Visual tools can help drive and support good iterative processes.
Actually getting people into the creative mindset is among the key challenges of ideation. Making mood boards — collections of images, items, and words — helps set your team on the road to good concepts. This visual tool can evoke emotions, set a consistent theme for the project, and empower your team to explore thoughts that lead to a clearer vision of what they want to achieve. Digital mood boards are a sustainable approach to this and allow project members across departments and working remotely to collaborate on them.
Once you’ve established themes and creative ideas, you could consider transitioning to brainstorming, transforming notions into actionable decisions. This visual tool revolves around setting central words or images related to the project and stemming off from them with further thoughts, questions, and concepts. Using virtual whiteboard software is a good way to ensure all those involved with ideation can contribute.
Supporting Time Management
Any project involves multiple tasks you and your team need to juggle in a finite amount of time. Improving your time management practices helps keep your projects on track and prevents everyone from becoming too overwhelmed or stressed. This includes adopting best practices, such as automating unnecessarily repetitive tasks and delegating effectively within your team. But there are some aspects — particularly in regard to good scheduling and clarifying goals — that can benefit from support from visual tools.
One of the simplest tools you can use here is cloud-based scheduling software. Online calendars enable you to visually break down your days into clear periods. You can then block out segments of your day to handle different types of tasks. Having full visibility of what you need to do each day and the time you have available empowers you to prioritize what you can achieve and identify tasks you might need to delegate. Indeed, with cloud-based scheduling tools, you can see the calendars of other staff members, which lets you make informed decisions about who may be best to delegate to.
Another visual time management tool to use is time-tracking software. These platforms allow you and all other staff members to keep tabs on the amount of time you each spend on different types of tasks throughout projects. Many also collate the data and produce visual reports that highlight what portions of the day are dedicated to specific activities and how long each worker is spending on them. This helps you to identify where areas of inefficiency are.
Encouraging Collaboration
Good collaboration is vital to successful projects. As a leader, you need to put structures in place that encourage your team members to cooperate. Providing them with visual tools that make their interactions with their colleagues and contributions to the project more convenient and manageable can influence your success.
Perhaps the most common visual tool for collaborative project management is Kanban card software. This is a system based on columns and cards. Each column represents a stage in the project workflow, with every card assigned to a specific task or subtask. Many platforms also enable you to assign cards to specific team members. This allows collaborators to see in real time what everyone else is doing in relation to the project and also how this affects their own contributions.
Such tools are particularly important when some members’ tasks are dependent on the completion of other contributors’ tasks before they can engage. Kanban card platforms are often compatible with cloud document storage tools, so teams can attach items to cards, supporting collaborative creation and editing as the task travels through different stages of the project timeline.
Additionally, if your projects involve a lot of people from across your company — and perhaps external contractors or industry partners — project-based organizational charts are essential. These visual tools outline the project’s hierarchy of contributors in an easy-to-understand way. It clarifies who each team member reports to and the roles everyone plays in the project.
For greater clarity, it’s wise to list the skills of each member, alongside the easiest contact processes. This type of visual document empowers staff members to efficiently connect with collaborators throughout the project. There are various org chart tools on the market that offer color coding that you support quickly identifying those leadership positions or even department delineations.
Conclusion
Visual tools can help make your project management processes more engaging, organized, and creative. You can benefit from exploring their potential in a range of areas, from how mood boards can support ideation to the practical use of Kanban cards in collaborations. Importantly, reach out to your project staff to ask what visual tools they find most useful. This helps to drive more relevant decision-making when choosing resources for your teams.
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