If you feel that you are answering the same basic questions over and over, your team members aren’t engaging with projects. If there is confusion about deadlines, deliverables, and workflow, you, as a project manager, need to give your team the gift of project visibility.
Achieving project visibility is quite challenging. Many companies use multiple tools, they don’t communicate well, and they have unclear roles. Project visibility offers you a clear picture of what’s happening with your projects at any stage, helps you to allocate resources, and identify potential risks. When tasks become visual, you improve communication, collaboration, and problem-solving. In this article, we give you some tips to improve your team’s project visibility.
1. Track work in one place
To achieve a high level of project visibility, you better bring all project-related data to one place. The way you and your team monitor work should always be consistent. When everyone uses different tools, visibility is hard to reach. We know MSPs love Trello, but those who use it along with ConnectWise or Autotask PSA end up with a problem because they have to duplicate a lot of data from the PSA to Trello. Efficient MSPs need an outstanding visualizations provider that helps to avoid wasting time duplicating data.
Kanban boards allow you to manage and visualize your entire company’s goals and work in one system. To track work effectively, make sure you select a software that automatically updates the status of work, brings you a real-time overview of blocked work, tasks ready for review, and work in progress. TopLeft is built on top of your PSA data to power up your current workflows.
2. Improve collaboration
It is essential that you bring to your team an efficient and collaborative tool that allows them to be on the same page about work, whether they work from home, office, or in a hybrid setup. Virtual Kanban boards allow your team members to get instant updates on their projects. Kanban Boards by TopLeft keep managers and engineers in sync by using the same view in real-time. As a result, your engineers will have better control over their tickets, and you will ensure visibility over how projects are progressing.
3. Run efficient meetings
Frequent and long meetings mean more visibility, right? Not really. If you have the right tool, it will allow you to do efficient meetings, get everyone on the same page and keep teams productive and creative. Get people working on tickets instead of just talking about what they hope to maybe start today. As an MSP, one of our company goals was to implement effective daily huddles. We started using TopLeft boards, which has helped us to improve communication, project/service flow, and prioritize work better. Here is an article where you can learn more about how to run effective daily huddles.
Kanban boards by TopLeft
As an MSP, we understand PSAs have weaknesses such as:
- No easy way to visualize data
- The lack of capability to see multiple projects at once
- Not able to manage multiple projects at a time
- Not being able to monitor bottlenecks or neglected work
You could solve some of these problems by using some sort of third-party project management software like Trello or Asana. But the problem is that these tools are not integrated with your PSA, which can cost some issues like, you would need to enter data twice (in your PSA and the project management tool), and you will end up with two sources of truth, where sometimes data doesn’t make its way back into the PSA.
The things mentioned above are some of the reasons why we built TopLeft. We needed better solutions, but we don’t have the time to keep the data anywhere else. The Kanban integration by TopLeft for ConnectWise and Autotask offers you Kanban boards for visualization and easy management. You will be able to see multiple projects at once – ticket level and project level. You can quickly identify bottlenecks and neglected work and save you time entering data because everything comes straight from your PSA.
With better project visibility comes better project management. If you are looking for a tool to support your team’s collaboration, you are in the right place. Schedule a demo with us.