How iMeet Central impacts your project management

Mastering project management should be mission critical for most businesses. Project mismanagement causes a serious ripple effect, impacting everything from morale to company revenue. In future posts, we’ll be continuing to take a deep dive into all facets of the PM world, including many tips and best practices that will pertain regardless of your specific PM scenario or solution.

Today, though, we’re talking specifically about project management as it relates to iMeet Central. At this year’s Collabosphere, engagement specialist and notable LA Kings fan Lauren Nunn demonstrated how we’re helping businesses solve challenges ranging from task management to employee onboarding.

Effective project management isn’t just about accomplishing tasks, but finding the best way to do your work.

“Efficiency is doing things right; Effectiveness is doing the right things” – Peter Drucker

Project management: onboarding

Links Modular Solutions wanted to create an onboarding process that was scalable and repeatable. Verbally communicating a bunch of information to new employees on their first days may be efficient in an information-dump sort of way, but it’s not the most effective way to manage onboarding, especially if scalability and consistency are priorities. Onboarding also created a number of potential hangups, as numerous items required sign-off from either HR or the new hire.

After setting up an onboarding workspace, Nunn worked with the team to identify key tasks like reading the employee handbook. By cloning milestones – since, again, it’s a repeatable process for each new hire – the company was able to provide a more personalized experience; each milestone would be named after the respective employee. Rather than information being communicated verbally, permalinks directed the new employees to all the information they needed – and the various paperwork that required their attention. On the HR side, it’s then very easy to have visibility into the status of each step; not only can you easily isolate stragglers but you can even double-check that critical documents have, in fact, been opened. This new approach to onboarding also offered a boost in user adoption, as it gets users accustomed to iMeet Central right from the start.

Project management: task management through databases

Allscripts is a leader in healthcare information technology solutions. When they came to Nunn to talk about project management, they’d already been using iMeet Central databases. Employees submitted project requests through web forms, and their tasks were then created by database workflow rules. (If you’d like to get cozier with databases, we’re offering free iMeet Central University courses on database creation, custom views, automated processes and advanced database features.)

To enhance its project management, the company set up a daily task queue that helped employees schedule and manage tasks even in the midst of quick turnarounds. Another important step: adding a management view, making it possible (and simple) for managers to effectively assign work by knowing what was already on everyone’s plates; by filtering, the manager can isolate only high-priority tasks, or only tasks assigned to a certain employee. Task tagging makes it easy to see current high-priority tasks vs. medium tasks or low-priority tasks, helping managers maintain a balanced workload. Other users, meanwhile, see a customized view that displays only the tasks that require that employee’s attention.

When milestones don’t make sense

Milestones require due dates, but you may have projects that are more fluid in nature. Instead of assigning time at the individual milestone level, you can utilize task lists and organize by phase (e.g. “concepting phase”) without needing to dispense any arbitrary deadlines along the way.

Dealing with slippery deadlines

Let’s just say, hypothetically, that some day in the distant future, something unexpected occurs and you’re forced to move an important deadline. This can cause massive headaches for project managers, as all sorts of moving pieces and future deadlines may be dependent on timely completion. Task dependencies automate the process; move the first deadline back by two days and the dates assigned to the dependent tasks will follow. Gantt charts help project managers see – and control – the future. Below, you can see a preview of editing due dates and creating new dependencies via a Gantt chart.

You can also listen to Lauren’s full Collabosphere session below.