Project management is an essential element that concerns any project involving collaboration, coordination, and planning. However, at times, it can be challenging to get the best out of it. Find out here how to practice conscious project management and empower teams to successfully achieve projects the healthy way.

“We consider employees are the best advocators and creators of any business endeavor.” – Enhance

Many employees leading projects will wear the “project management” hat. However, the position remains widely misunderstood due to the variety of practices in the project management field but also the various frames of actions depending on professions and industries. Yet, having project management capabilities is a highly needed competency to achieve any project successfully – and in a healthy way! Since completing any project in chaos is the easiest thing to do, as it highlights a bunch of unorganized people trying to bring something out of the endeavor rather of true “creativity in process”. While such practices work, they are a common habit for unhealthy and unconscious companies.

Enhance advocates for conscious and responsible businesses, empowering not only brands and their customers but also the people behind them. As a conscious brand, we consider employees are the best advocators and creators of any business endeavor. Unhealthy businesses create unhappy employees, and create bad product and services, ultimately leading to unhappy customers.

How can we enhance conscious practices in project management? Let’s check out a few tips to successfully complete projects in a healthy environment and happy teams!

Define a decision-making process

Before starting a project, team members should define or know clearly who will manage the said project and who makes final decisions. Why is it important? Because despite experience/seniority/title positions, it is essential to define the right leader for the job at hand and to let all members of the team know. With the ongoing culture of startups and entrepreneurship, horizontal hierarchy is the new do. Such trend leads to the involvement of multiple people in projects thanks to lean processes and transparent communication. A side effect of this is a general confusion in job assignments between teams.

For this reason, defining a decision-making process, assessing responsibilities and defining the decision maker is key. By definition, a good leader should have a holistic vision, be able to define a scope of action (realistic) by assessing the right amount of resources (in time and people) to people and being able to manage them, while remaining open and transparent.

Create a communication framework

In the ’90s, oral culture was the way to collaborate. In the digital era, such culture doesn’t work anymore. Why? Because actions – that mostly happen in the digital realm – are going too fast to rely only on oral culture. Therefore, you need to define a communication framework and start using digital task management tools. Two main advantages of such tools are the ability to follow projects in progress and the broader vision such platforms bring on projects.

Which one to choose? Multiple task management tools are available for any type of projects. Depending on your needs and capabilities, you can choose between platforms (Trello, Asana) available for free or other more sophisticated available for a monthly fee (Monday, Jira). After defining the appropriate management task tool, it’s time to customize the tool to make it work for the team and the project in place.

Is oral communication over? Certainly not. Before starting any project and to ensure the collaboration of the team, several points should be discussed orally first: the global communication framework, the choice of the digital management tool, the said project, and finally people’s tasks assessments. The same applies after starting to use the digital tool: before assessing people to tasks or create new tasks, you should involve people directly first. Indeed, it can be tempting to communicate only through task management tools once the project started. However, it is always nice and useful to interact first before onboarding anyone on any type of project displayed in the tool – and this, especially when people are not used to the platform.

Enhance collaboration

Once a communication framework is implemented, leaders should enhance collaboration. In marketing and communication, for example, the department is fully ingrained in the development of businesses. As a result, to implement communication tools and campaigns it is best to know/understand a business and its direction.

For this reason, having a general collaborative environment within the company will help to create accurate MarCom inputs. While teams and departments should be aware of their own respective goals, collaboration should be enhanced between people in order to calibrate (or re-calibrate) current projects implementations during their completion.

Monitor and celebrate milestones

During the progression of a project, highs and lows are common while completing main tasks and sub-tasks. To prevent this, project leaders should monitor projects to take the temperature of people’s states of motivation and the overall project. In addition, providing healthy feedbacks in between milestones is the way to go in order to achieve successfully any big project at any company.

Another way to keep the team on board is by celebrating important milestones. Such practice will show acknowledgment of their work and will give the opportunity to share the accomplishment within the company. Celebrating milestones is also the occasion to reflect on tasks, find out if things aren’t working, and ultimately it has the purpose to motivate team members to approach new milestones with enthusiasm and confidence. And by the end of the project, celebrate its completion big time! 👏