Sleepwalking into Project Management

Many of us are managing work right now. Internally at CPS, our marketing teams are busily preparing for events. Our HR and Employee Forum have been busy preparing for Christmas. Our Compliance Department is busy planning for and conducting ISO audits.

Every one of these departments manages work or, looking at it another way, managing a small work package or project. They don’t necessarily know it, but the lead person is acting as the “Project Manager”.

They are:

• Pulling together a team of people
• Understanding the scope and activities that need to take place
• Working through dependencies and risks
• Chasing for updates, ensuring things are being done when they are needed
• Managing change (change always arises)
• Communicating progress to relevant stakeholders

There are thousands of these people working in every organisation under the sun right now. Most of them work with Excel spreadsheets or other disjointed tools, which don’t aid collaboration or give sufficient information on progress, dependencies, and much more.

The wonderful thing about the Microsoft platform is the plethora of work management solutions available to us. For these small ad-hoc work packages, we don’t need to be using big complex PPM solutions such as Project Online. However, we should be looking at embracing the technology around us. Deploying products such as Project for the Web, surfaced within Teams gives these “Accidental Project Managers” the tools they need to make their lives just a little bit easier.

Easy to use but powerful for collaboration and work management, project for the web is simple to adopt and easy to master. Solutions such as this can help manage these smaller, more ad-hoc work packages within your organisation. Don’t fall for the belief that project management tools are only for experienced project managers – they really are not, and you would be amazed how easy they are to deploy, how cheap they are and how well received they would be by your organisation.