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Author: Jimmy Rodela

Jimmy is a freelance writer and the owner of the GuildofBloggers.com. He has contributed to several reputable websites like SEMRush, SeachEnginePeople, and Business.com
PMTimes_Sep21_2022

Best of PMTimes: 5 Tactics To Successfully Handle Multiple Projects Simultaneously

Managing multiple projects at the same time can be an absolute n-i-g-h-t-m-a-r-e.

 

You need to keep track of your projects’ moving parts, ensure you’re using the right processes and strategies, stay within deadline, keep your employees motivated, and be mindful of your expenses.
Data even shows that on average, 88% of remote workers experience miscommunications and inconsistent leadership with team members, highlighting the importance of proper program and project management.

Sadly, we just scratched the surface. So much more goes into project management than the things we pointed out.

The good news is, there are tips and tricks to help you manage multiple projects simultaneously.

Continue reading to learn five proven tactics that will help you run your projects efficiently.

 

1. Stay On Top Of Your Work Schedules

Regardless of how carefully you planned your projects, everything can easily go off track if you don’t establish a schedule that includes your team’s work for the month, quarter, or year.

For instance, without a clear schedule, team members might fail to prioritize tasks, overlook critical jobs, and miss deadlines, which can seriously hinder your project’s completion and even impact the result’s quality.

Use reliable work scheduling software to ensure every project team member is on the same page, keep your workflows moving seamlessly, and keep everything on track.

For instance, Deputy lets you build work schedules in minutes by using its easy-to-use interface to schedule the right team members at the right time across various locations and roles.

 

You can easily create shifts, assign them to staff members, drag and drop to change them, copy schedules, modify them accordingly, and export them to a CSV file, spreadsheet, or print them.

You can also send the schedule directly to your team through mobile or desktop. If you change the schedule, the assigned person gets a notification, and they can accept the confirmation request.

A robust scheduling tool helps ensure your lines don’t get crossed, work gets done, and your project deadlines are met.

This helps keep your multiple projects on track and your team members more productive. Your project schedules will also be maximized for optimum efficiency, avoiding potential delays.

 

2. Prioritize Tasks

With so much on your plate, it can be tempting to tackle the easiest projects first, but you must resist, or you could kill your team’s productivity and efficiency.

Prioritize based on tasks that will have the most significant impact on your project and program goals. This helps you manage several priorities while working on multiple projects effectively.

Doing so allows your team to work strategically on both micro (i.e., organizing daily to-dos based on importance) and macro (i.e., moving low-impact projects to the following quarter) levels.

Let’s say your team is working on four product launches simultaneously with the overarching goal of increasing customer revenue.

While the four projects require about the same amount of time, effort, and resources to complete and roll out, assess which one has the potential to generate a bigger impact on your new customer revenue than the other three.

Prioritize the project (or projects) that have the most significant contribution to achieving your goals.

This helps you manage your resources and allocate your time better while ensuring your efforts align with your project goals and deliver your desired results.

 

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3. Establish Goals And Plans

Without establishing a standard project planning process or workflow, you’ll likely manage each of your projects differently.

This can lead to issues down the line, such as inconsistencies in your deliverables and precious time wasted on setting up new processes for each project.

That is why you need to have a solid plan, establish standard processes, and identify responsibilities from the get-go.

Outline everything from your goals, each step, and task necessary for project completion, schedules and deadlines, and the persons and teams responsible for specific jobs at the project level.

At the program level, develop plans, processes, and clarify responsibilities. Establish team-level goals and communicate the projects crucial to achieving those objectives.

You can start outlining your goals using a Specific, Measurable, Accurate, Realistic, and Timely  (SMART) approach and this sample goal-setting template.

 

You can use other templates as references and build on those to develop your project and program objectives.

Optimize your project management processes by setting team-wide standards. For instance, you can require project team leads to submit a brief before outlining a project plan for big projects.

You can also create templates for projects your team often handles to ensure consistency across projects and save time and effort.

Clear goals, plans, and responsibilities help your teams avoid inconsistencies in processes and deliverables.

 

4. Conduct Systematic Progress Updates

Tracking status and progress updates in a multi-project environment are critical to keeping stakeholders and key project players in the loop.

After all, you wouldn’t want your clients, for instance, to be breathing down your neck because you didn’t give them any status reports, making it crucial to establish a systematic updating process.

 

 

Establish smart, systematic status updates so that you can manage stakeholder expectations efficiently.

Below are a few tips for doing strategic and systematic project status updates.

  •     Define expectations. Layout the specific steps task owners or the team members in-charge of particular tasks are expected to follow. Identify a time frame for updating relevant stakeholders, whether every three days, weekly, monthly, etc.
  •     Include a high-level overview of key areas in the project. Add several bullet points that provide an update on the accomplishments, progress, and upcoming work for each key area of your project’s status. This ensures essential points are covered, and stakeholders get all the necessary updates they need.
  •     Schedule accountability. Have third-parties, such as staff in another department, the project sponsor, or other stakeholders, conduct reviews to ensure the resource person or task owner follows protocol and the specified updating time frame to a tee.

Implement a systematic status updating process to keep your project team motivated, ensure they understand the project plan, why it’s crucial to stay up to date, and clearly see the multiple demands your team must meet.

 

5. Delegate And Empower Team Members

Exercise effective delegation in your resource management by adopting clarity, authority, and accountability.

For instance, empowering your graphic designer to create a landing page for a new project means making sure he/she is absolutely clear about the task by providing a work breakdown structure.

This work breakdown structure of building a landing page campaign for a new product from Kanbanize is a good example.

 

A work breakdown structure outlines the phases of the project process clearly.

Additionally, to ensure the project process and phases are when delegating, be sure to:

  •     Clearly communicate the work breakdown structure
  •     Set a project deadline
  •     Relay specific client expectations
  •     List down the available resources the task owner has
  •     Describe the workload
  •     Provide him/her the authority to make and carry out decisions

Clarity ensures your team is clear on the direction. Team members avoid any guesswork and prioritize critical tasks and projects.

A clear work breakdown structure and project scope will also empower teamwork that boosts productivity while giving members a sense of fulfillment for meeting multiple demands.
Leverage a reliable project management tool that can streamline your work breakdown structure’s workflows and processes.

Data can back up the effectiveness of using the right project management tool with 77% of high-performing projects using project management software.

 

What’s Next?

Handling multiple projects at the same time is inevitable in project management and any efforts you take on.

While the tips in this guide are in no way guaranteed formulas for success, these are good building blocks to help develop your strategies for effective and strategic multiple project management.

Leverage the tactics we shared to stay on top of your projects’ moving pieces, meet your deadlines, and achieve your goals.

Streamline Your Social Media Project Management With These 4 Tips

Like most busy companies, you struggle to manage your social media campaigns efficiently on top of handling other projects and your daily to-dos.

If you don’t plan, organize, and strategize, you’re not likely to run your campaigns effectively or get your expected results and returns.

This is where social media project management comes in.

Essentially, social media project management takes the basic principles of ecommerce project management and applies them to social media projects.

It involves the skills, knowledge, techniques, and tools used in a structured approach to help you and your team meet your social media project requirements and goals seamlessly.

Learn more about managing your social media projects as efficiently as possible with these four tips.

 

What is social media project management?

Social media project management refers to managing campaigns across social media marketing channels.

Social media marketing is often complex. It involves doing tons of research, planning campaigns, creating content, scheduling posts, photography, graphic design, monitoring analytics, and other tasks.

Running social media campaigns can also involve multiple departments and team members who need to manage tasks efficiently and collaborate effectively.

Social media project management can address and streamline these through reliable tools, processes, systems, and workflows. It can help everyone stay on the same page and keep the projects on schedule.

4 Tips to manage your social media projects efficiently

Getting an overall view of the many aspects of your social media campaigns and projects is critical to your marketing efforts’ success.

After all, having visibility into every process makes it easier to track and check your campaigns’ progress and performance.

You’ll also know whether your team is staying on track and make the right adjustments promptly.

Below are some strategic ways to streamline your social media project management process.

1. Leverage the right tools

Using reliable tools is crucial to running your social media marketing campaigns and managing your projects effectively.

Some of these platforms and apps include:

  • Lead capture tools
  • Reliable task management software
  • Asset repositories
  • Social media content calendars
  • Analytics platforms
  • Social media listening and monitoring software
  • User-Generated Content (UGC) tools
  • Contest and promotional management apps

Some tools cover most, if not all, of these features.

For instance, Vista Social offers an all-in-one social media marketing platform with modern, sophisticated features—from post scheduling to robust TikTok tools for marketing.

Use the platform to plan, create, organize, and schedule your social media content to auto-publish across your connected social networks easily.

Image source: vistasocial.com.

You can manage and track your engagement through Smart Inbox and Review Management features and monitor mentions of your brand in your network.

You can also plan your social media activities and posts through a content calendar and auto-generate your analytics reports with ease.

Image source: vistasocial.com.

Additionally, opt for tools that integrate seamlessly with your existing toolset.

You’ll save time and energy replicating information and processes across platforms while managing your social media marketing tasks and projects efficiently.

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2. Perform regular social media audits

Your team is more likely to run social media project management processes effectively when informed by data.

The key is to regularly conduct a social media audit (monthly, quarterly, bi-annually, or annually) to gain valuable insights into what’s working (and what’s not).

You’ll also get a good idea about the platforms your audience spends the most time in and the content types that drive the most engagement.

Leverage handy social media audit tools to perform your assessments easily.

Depending on your in-house expertise and resources, you can integrate data flows between popular big data analytics tools and your social media audit tool for more comprehensive analysis and insights.

Perform periodic social media audits to eliminate guesswork and refine your current strategy. It helps ensure you don’t run your projects and campaigns blindly.

Create and deploy campaigns tailored to your target audiences’ needs and interests and focus your efforts on what resonates most with your potential customers.

You’ll avoid wasting resources and optimize your social media project management process to drive meaningful results.

3. Create platform specific audience personas

Maintain a consistent brand voice and image across your social media marketing channels is crucial.

However, you’ll need to tailor your campaigns based on the specific platform and audience groups.

After all, your LinkedIn audience, consisting mostly of professionals, likely has different interests than your Instagram followers, who are focused more on entertainment, shopping, and aesthetics.

The solution? Create personas for your target audiences on specific social media platforms.

Doing so allows you to create social media campaigns, content, messaging, etc., tailored to the audience groups’ unique preferences and needs.

Create or refine your social media audience personas using tools such as MakeMyPersona from HubSpot.

Generate your audience persona templates based on the demographic traits, job, social media consumption habits, preferred communication channels, and more.

Image source: hubspot.com.

Creating personas helps you know your audience better, informing and shaping your strategies.

It allows you to target your social media audience with specific campaigns designed for certain platforms and like-minded personas or audiences.

Essentially, creating personas helps you create and deliver campaigns and content to the right social media audience groups through the best-fitting channels at the best time.

You’ll have a higher chance of engaging your audience and achieving social media marketing success.

Remember to keep your audience personas updated and readily accessible to your social media marketing team.

4. Provide clear responsibilities and workflows

Some common roadblocks that keep you from achieving seamless social media project management are unclear roles, responsibilities, and workflows.

Ensure your team members know who should handle specific tasks to avoid confusion and potential delays that cause bottlenecks in your workflows.

Provide written or documented workflows and processes to outline the steps required in each promotion or campaign.

Include the stages of getting the manager’s approval before posting new creatives and guidelines on where to find and use UGCs properly.

Also, provide directions on tagging products appropriately for your social selling efforts, such as creating Instagram shoppable posts.

Image source: instagram.com.

Providing clear roles, responsibilities, and workflows helps ensure your team members know the tasks they’re supposed to handle. It allows for a more seamless and, in turn, effective social media project management process.

Optimize managing your social media projects

While social media project management can be complex, it doesn’t have to be rocket science.

Take inspiration from the tips in this guide.

Establish clear workflows, leverage the best-fitting tools, automate when you can, know whether your efforts are succeeding or failing, and ultimately supercharge your social media project management process.

You’re likely to drive meaningful results and get excellent returns to achieve social media marketing success.

Scale Your Company’s Effectively With These Top 5 Business Trends

The global business landscape is rapidly changing, making it challenging for businesses to keep up.

If you don’t know and learn to adapt to the emerging business trends, you could miss opportunities to scale and grow your business.

The solution? Understand the five major trends below.

These trends are likely to dominate the business landscape in the coming years. Learning them now can help you scale your company and better position it for success.

1. Growing customer preference for alternative pickup options

The pandemic has forced many companies to get more creative at the point of sale to accommodate changes in how customers wanted (and needed) to obtain products.

As a result, alternative pickup options and contactless delivery dominated 2020, which is likely to continue moving forward.

According to data from Medallia Zingle, 87% of surveyed customers prefer that businesses continue to offer options such as curbside pickup to limit in-person visits.

One of the top small business trends to follow to accommodate customer preferences is to invest in contactless delivery, curbside pickup, touchless payment, and other options.

Doing so allows you to prepare your business to accommodate this shift in how customers want and expect to buy and acquire your products.

2. Expansion to eCommerce

While online shopping isn’t new, the shift from physical stores to eCommerce will only continue to boom.

Data shows a forecasted growth of 16.1%, reaching $1.06 trillion in 2022 for U.S. retail eCommerce sales—highlighting how online shopping isn’t likely to slow down any time soon.

Optimize your business’s eCommerce presence to stay ahead of this trend, especially if you’re a brick-and-mortar store shifting to the digital space.

Some of the ways to help you adopt this trend effectively include:

  • Setting up an eCommerce website or optimizing your existing site for mobile and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to help increase your web page rankings and visibility.
  • Leveraging the best digital channels to use for your online marketing efforts, such as social media, email marketing, and all the channels successful ecommerce companies utilize.
  • Delivering personalized and memorable shopping experiences on your website to stand out from your competitors while encouraging purchases from your visitors.

3. Increase in foot traffic

While more customers prefer to shop online, consumers who want to shop in physical stores are likely to increase as restrictions are lowered.

Data from Adentro substantiates this, showing that the average customer foot traffic growth to physical stores is at 27.44% as of February 2022.

Prepare your brick-and-mortar store for the potentially significant increase in foot traffic by providing various payment and pickup options.

You can also offer seamless offline and online marketing, sales, and customer service processes.

One example is to provide an omnichannel experience that allows customers to shop and buy your products across connected (online and offline) touchpoints and channels seamlessly.

For instance, customers can shop and pay online and pick up their purchases from their nearest physical store.

4. Emphasis on social media marketing

According to Statista, the number of social media users globally will reach almost 4.41 billion by 2025.

With this massive number of social media users, platforms such as Facebook and Instagram will remain excellent channels for marketing.

That is because you’ll have a huge reserve of audiences you can tap into and potentially turn into paying and loyal customers on social media platforms.

Below are some of the social media marketing trends to watch for and leverage for your business.

More companies will hire dedicated staff for social media

Social media marketing has a huge potential to drive engagement, conversions, and sales, prompting companies to hire dedicated people to manage social media initiatives.

Dedicated social media hires allow you to optimize your social media marketing efforts instead of tasking your already busy teams.

You can prioritize your social media marketing efforts and avoid missing tons of conversion and sales opportunities.

With a social media manager, you can turn social media marketing into a revenue-generating initiative for your business.

Social media advertising will be more sophisticated

The third-party cookie is bound to die out as Google will start to phase out cookie tracking by 2023.

The death of third-party cookies means you’ll need to pivot your advertising strategies and turn to other approaches.

This is where targeted ads across social media channels and User-Generated Content (UGC) come in.

Instead of relying on third-party cookies, 2022 onward will likely open opportunities to develop data-driven strategies using metrics based on social media user interactions with your brand.

The focus will more likely be on using the metrics to understand your target audiences’ preferences and interests more personally and deeply.

It can help you tailor your ads better to address your audience’s pain points and problems and ultimately compel viewers into acting on your offers.

Consumers will prefer bite-sized content

TikTok, Instagram Reels, and Facebook Stories are becoming the most preferred ways for social media users to engage with brands.

As such, 2022 and beyond will see audiences consuming more bite-sized content across social media channels.

Develop solid social media marketing strategies to help your business gain a competitive advantage over other brands that are also jumping into the “snackable” content trend.

5. AI and big data will drive core business processes

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and big data will play crucial and even bigger roles in collecting and analyzing massive volumes of business information.

AI and data analytics are bound to become more advanced and sophisticated, fueling critical business processes such as marketing, sales, customer service, etc.

Through AI and big data technologies, you can gain actionable insights quickly to help you:

  • Target audiences with your marketing campaigns better
  • Streamline internal process workflows
  • Forecast and predict sales and marketing patterns and trends

Advanced AI, Machine Learning (ML), and big data analytics tools are likely to become indispensable.

These technologies allow your business to gain more in-depth knowledge about your customers’ preferences, interests, demographics, and content consumption and buying behaviors.

You can leverage the data to provide highly personalized and custom consumer experiences.

Essentially, adopting more sophisticated AI and data analytics technologies will become necessary to succeed in the modern business landscape.

The technologies will allow minimal guesswork and more data-based strategies and decision-making for companies across industries.

Know the latest trends to position your business for success

Business trends can come and go and rapidly change, but some are meant to stay and will only continue to evolve over the years.

Understand the latest business trends to learn how these can impact your core business processes and initiatives, helping you scale and grow your company.

Get a head start by knowing the business trends in this guide.

How Project Managers Can Unlock Visibility In The Supply Chain

Supply chains are an essential component of modern businesses. Every industry depends on them to ensure goods are delivered on time and in perfect conditions. The slightest disruption can throw processes awry and create immense losses for stakeholders.

Visibility into supply chain processes helps minimize errors thanks to end-to-end connectivity. When speaking of visibility implementation, most discussions center around IoT devices and the need for front-end processes to tie together.

However, visibility into supply chain logistics also depends heavily on back-end processes tying together. Project managers have immense input in process design and must ensure that infrastructure doesn’t turn into a roadblock to visibility. Here are a few key ways supply chain project managers can ensure they meet their organization’s broader visibility goals.

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Define Project Scope

Visibility depends on various systems talking to each other. For instance, a manufacturing unit communicates condition-related data to its logistics partner’s systems. This overlap often causes issues on the back-end, especially when enhancing infrastructure.

New projects can potentially get lost in a maze of scope creep if project managers neglect to define boundaries appropriately. Continuing the previous example, if a project manager in charge of upgrading logistics systems strays too much into the manufacturing unit’s data structure and job scheduling, they’re likely to take on too much work.

Managers must define the scope thoroughly during the project planning phase. More importantly, they must seek buy-in from project stakeholders to avoid miscommunication down the road. A good way to receive buy-in is to spell out requirements as clearly as possible. This way, PMs can prevent confusion and also transparently communicate project goals.

Standardize Communication

 

When multiple systems and teams talk to each other, communication typically suffers. Each team uses different standards and modes of conveying information, and this leads to confusion in the back-end of supply chain systems.

Project managers can mitigate this problem by standardizing and simplifying communication standards. For instance, if a data issue from an upstream partner is creating testing issues on their system, PMs can create communication and report templates that their teams can use.

These templates can also be shared with upstream and downstream partners to simplify communication. It’s best to implement these templates during the dev and testing phases. By doing this, any production issues will be dealt with swiftly.

PMs will have to deal with some pushback from their project partners since everyone will likely prefer different templates. Collaboration, then, is the key to unlocking visibility in the supply chain. So always focus on collaborating to create the best back-end system that supports business aims.

Create Knowledge Repositories

 

Implementing visibility requires teams from every area of the supply chain to come together and integrate their systems. Project releases typically follow an iterative or CD release process. In the rush to release upgrades and constantly improve the product, critical development information tends to get lost.

 If a project team is localized, this isn’t necessarily an issue. After all, there will always be informed personnel around to explain key decisions and historic choices. However, supply chain projects do not work like that. Often spanning the globe, they’re vast and involve teams that might never see each other face-to-face.

 Standardized communication, as previously highlighted, goes a long way towards ensuring visibility-enhancing projects proceed smoothly. However, PMs must create knowledge repositories and archives to help external teams understand their systems and data structures.

For instance, if an upgrade involves scheduling an ETL process from an external source, the PM and dev team must familiarize themselves with the upstream system’s data formats and models. Without a repository or knowledge base, the team will rely on inefficient emails and meetings where nothing gets solved.

A repository will allow them to quickly determine which data sets they need, the formats they need them in, and communicate this to the upstream team. Thus, iterative releases become simpler, and front-end visibility doesn’t suffer.

Prepare Data Appropriately

 

A project’s success and progress are measured by the business impact it creates. In an interconnected series of projects, measuring success can turn into an issue if PMs neglect measuring success with the right metrics. Often, data from external sources are necessary to measure success.

For instance, a logistics PM will have to take condition-related data from the manufacturer and downstream partner into account, and isolate them from their datasets. Only once this separation has been achieved can they create reports measuring delivery success.

Every stakeholder in the supply chain runs analytics these days, and cleaning data is an essential task. PMs must verify their ETL processes for data integrity and make sure any changes they make are communicated to downstream entities.

Downstream changes often rear their head when upgrading from legacy to modern systems. In such instances, it’s best to refer to knowledge repositories and communicate changes to all stakeholders. Standardizing data models and database design principles is also a good way of ensuring data integrity is maintained across multiple systems.

Back-End Processes Essential For Visibility

 

While front-end technology receives the bulk of the attention when speaking of visibility, backend processes are just as important. PMs play a significant role when determining process design. These 4 tips will help them create robust processes that ensure visibility is implemented and maintained throughout the supply chain.