Project Management Practitioner

Delivering a project is not an easy task, a PM faces lot of hurtles, issues, overcome several roller-coaster rides during the entire course of project. During this period he may need to handle countless tasks, follow-ups and so on.

How can he/she manages all these and yet to be productive? Is there any solutions available?

Yes..Technology is one of the easiest solution a PM can depend on tracking/handling all his/her project related tasks.

We can use one of very known software program as a very efficient Project Management tool with very minimal effort. I am using Microsoft Outlook as my base productivity tool. I would like to share how I use Outlook for my day-to-day project management.

I classify my usage into the following major categories.

1. Tasks
   a. Create your WBS items as task lists with enough advance reminder setup. Once you have done, it will automatically prompt to remind your upcoming  milestones, pending tasks and etc.
   b. Input all you project related tasks and activities.
   c. Assign tasks to your resource from Outlook and track

2. Contacts
   a. Distribution List(DL)
   Create local distribution list for each project for specific purpose. Eg. Project Status Report DL with all Project Stake Holders and team members. Escalation DL with Senior/Higher management. This will ensure that your project communications reaches all intended recipients every time and no one was missed.
   b. Store your project team members, stake holders as personal contacts. Update these contacts with additional or more contact details such as IM, Mobile, Mailing Address and supplement with some key notes…This will be handy while you need additional avenues to reach somebody.

3. Calendar
   a. Always schedule your meetings with Calendar.
   b. Encourage your team members to update their leave plans in calendar
   c. If you are busy with some meeting activities and don’t want to be disturbed by meeting request from others, better mark those timings as busy in your calendar.

4. Mail
   a. Personal  Folders
   Use project wise personal folders and housekeep all projects mails
   b. Follow-up option
   Use follow-up tag in the email and setup the target date time for the important mails which requires follow-up. This will prompt and remind you and other parties on time.
   c. Keep only a or two weeks mails in the Inbox and Sent Items folders. This will ensure sufficient storage to receive and send new mails
   d. Large Mails - Always move the larger mails into personal folders
   e. Outlook Web Access - If available, setup & test this feature to access your mailbox from home
   f. Out-Of-Office - Encourage the entire project team including yourself to enable the O-O-O while on leave with sufficient informations including backup persons, absence period and so on.
   c. Macros
   If you VBA programming, use to automate some of the regular house keeping jobs

Remember these are additional utilities for productivity and final output is depends on you.

-Posted by Dhana