Motivate & Maintain Productivity With Project Management Tools

Today, a single project manager can monitor a team of ten or even more people easily and efficiency thanks to project management tools.

In almost any line of work, people can rely on online software or tools to help them with job completion, task distribution, and progress tracking.

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As far as project management tools go, they are commonly tailored for a specific line of work since it’s easier to reach the targeted audience this way. However, in spite of this, project management tools must have a few features in common in order to motivate workers and to maintain their productivity. So, we will go over these crucial features and explain how they impact your business in a positive way.

Ticket/Task Assignment

When we say task assignment, it’s hard to argue the fact that project management revolutionized this procedure, since you can assign tasks even without it. However, with project management tools, you get to speed up the process and have a neat overview of all assignments.

Furthermore, if the production process requires more than one phase to complete the product, your workers can assign the task to the next employee in line. So, when the first phase is complete, an employee can simply switch their assignment to the next team member. This way, you do not have to constantly monitor if something is on hold; everything will happen smoothly and there will be no task clusters.

Some online project management tools can be calibrated so that you do not even need to assign tasks. For example, if someone works in the customer support department, the customer can simply provide input regarding the issue, and the system automatically assigns the issue to a person responsible for the solution, which once again keeps the workflow running without any external influence.

Time Tracking

Time tracking project management software is an important feature for many reasons, and improving motivation is just one of them. First, you get to see just how much time it takes you to complete a certain project, giving you a better insight into its overall value.

Moreover, your workers can (in a way) compete with themselves and track their own improvement, since they will get a chance to beat their old record. When employees know that someone measures their time, they are less likely to get distracted or loiter on tasks.

When it comes to management, time tracking project management software can give you far better orientation in terms of how long it will take to finish a certain task, which will help you organize your work day in a way that does not overburden your teammates. As long as you do not overexert your workforce, they will continue to be productive.

An easy to navigate UI

The ideal tools for common users are free, simple, project management software solutions since these are the types of tools they are most likely to use. A bit obvious, but some of them simply fail to deliver. Your tool can be extremely helpful and have myriads of useful features, but if these features are inaccessible to the common user, you are not doing your job right.

Project management tools can only be useful if users can master it quickly and find solutions intuitively. Otherwise, it will present a hindrance. In other words, drag and drop features and systematically organized folders are an essential part of every management tool. Moreover, any feature that is used frequently needs to be on display at all times, like the search bar for example. Lastly, in order to fully optimize your management tool for the masses, you need to add multiple languages, so that users from all around the world can choose their native tongue as a default language.

Resource management

Another important feature, regardless of the line of work the tool was designed for, is resource management. People love efficiency, and the resource management feature inspires them to come up with more optimal solutions. It’s basically like solving a puzzle, especially if they are allowed to keep the remaining resources as a reward for a job well done.

Also, if they exceed their expectations by managing to do something more efficiently, they gain a great sense of achievement, much like with the time tracking feature. Basically, the main advantage of free simple project management software is inspiring and maintaining this sense of achievement, and that is one of the main motivators when it comes to working in an organization.

Reports and progress tracking

This is an incredibly handy advantage when you need to complete and manage more copious projects. Your ongoing projects will be completed much faster when everybody knows how much they managed to finish. You can create milestones for those projects, to allow your users to feel a sense of accomplishment after every completed task. This can make larger tasks seem far less daunting, and workers will be far more engaged when it comes to completing them.

Collaboration tools and integration capabilities

Lastly, your project management tool needs to allow your workers to collaborate regardless of their location. This is why most quality platforms operate in the cloud.

It is a safe way to store your documents and limit access to the chosen few and to access those documents and work on them even from your home. This kind of flexibility gives your teammates more freedom, and no one is pressured if someone is prevented from coming to work since collaboration is possible online.

As you can see, these are the most important features of anytime project management platform, because they help you stay more productive and motivated, and allow you to organize the entire workflow a lot better. Everybody can have a far better insight into how well the project is going. They’ll know when each project will be completed, and also whether their efforts were profitable. Additionally, the extra flexibility can help a lot, since it prevents work from piling up and falling behind schedule.