The two levels of Project Management: How to Create Short and Long-Term Success

Often, it’s a balancing act of things you can control, things you have an influence on and things beyond your control.

One thing that can increase your influence is having data to back it up.

That’s where project management solutions come in.

Project level: Short-Term Benefits of project management tools

In the short term, project management tools should help organize and track daily tasks, so you and your team members are aware of the progress being made, can raise flags, and use resources where they make the most impact.

In short: short-term optimization is all about getting a set task completed on time in a way that fulfills predetermined requirements.

Tools like this can be

1. Centralized communication

Collecting all your project-related information in a central place makes communication much more efficient. With tools like Microsoft Teams, or Slack, team members can stay up to date on everything they need – and use search features to locate relevant information.

2. Assigning and tracking tasks

Who’s doing what, and how far are they? The project manager should be assigning tasks to team members, following the progress to alleviate any roadblocks. Having a solution that allows team members to track individual and collective progress improves communication, facilitates collaboration, and makes everything more transparent. This is something like Microsoft Planner for simple needs or Power PPM for the whole 9 yards.

3. Time Management

Tracking time spent on projects is helpful to get a sense of where you are according to plan, and identifying bottlenecks before they become an issue. There’s lots of simple time tracking tools, but tools with reporting, like Time for Teams, saves time when it comes to quickly getting the full picture.

4. Reporting

Dashboards and reporting with data from the entire team keep everybody informed on the plan and allow everybody to spot where adjustments might be needed. This could be project/task progress, milestones, risk monitoring, time tracking, budget, etc. Deciding what to tack usually happens before the project is undertaken but should be adjusted if new needs arise.

Planning level: Long-Term Strategies

While short-term project management is about getting the project to completion. Long-term project management is about identifying patterns and improving processes and tools based on lessons over time.

If you’re agile, you might do a retrospective and try to learn from the previous sprint and apply the lessons going forward. However, it’s worth thinking a little bit more strategically to set yourself up for long-term success.

The trick is finding tools that give you short-term optimization (and joy) as well as long-term benefits.

It becomes a cycle.

What you do during a project should set you up to benefit long-term, and the analysis you do long-term should make the short-term more enjoyable and efficient.

Short-term measures lead to long-term results, and long-term analysis leads to optimization of short-term processes.

So, let’s look at the project-level activities and see what we can include to optimize it for the higher planning level.

1. Long-term communication: Documentation.

There’s a lot of communication during projects that doesn’t necessarily have to be remembered forever, however, thinking about necessary documentation as you’re doing the project not only saves you from a boring post-project task but also ensures that you capture the relevant information while it’s still top of mind. Is there any way that documentation can also benefit project execution? Create documentation templates that fit your organization and modify them as you use them and learn. Do you find that people look at the documentation and always have similar follow-up questions? Add it to the template.

2. Tracking tasks

During the project as you’re tracking tasks, it’s all about completion on time, within scope, and on budget. Long term, you should be looking at the quality of your planning. Are there any phases that always run over time? Is there a tendency to scope creep with certain types of customers? Are there tasks that run over budget? Spend some time figuring out why work runs the way it does and experimenting with solutions. Then, compare data to the new measures.

3. Time management

On the project level this is about: do we have enough time to get it done? On a higher level, it becomes about looking at whether we’re using the right people for the right things. You want your employees to be happy and have a comfortable level of challenges – do people in general feel that? There’s a difference between working overtime once to get a project over the finish line and having it be a tacit requirement, in general, to finish projects in your organization.

4. Reporting

In the end, it all comes down to having a great data foundation for advanced analytics. Over time, project management tools accumulate valuable data. Setting your project management solution up for capturing and storing the data gives you new possibilities for learning. Analyzing this data can reveal trends and patterns, providing insights into productivity, project costs, and resource allocation. Tools like Jira, Microsoft Project, and Power PPM offer robust analytics to inform future projects.

Great planning happens every day.

Most projects are a balance of continuous planning and execution. You can’t really separate short-term and long-term benefits; they’re intertwined.

Good project managers are constantly planning both short-term and long-term activities that inform and feed off each other. The biggest challenge is collecting this information and keeping it somewhere central: somewhere that both gives you a picture of the status quo as well as setting you up for long-term strategic execution.

You need something more than Excel to do that.

You need real project management solutions.

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