Project Management
Understanding Project Management
From a small brick and mortar business, to a large company with multiple departments, or even an online enterprise, there are many techniques and tools that can be utilized to help make workflow more efficient and meet tight deadlines.
One of the best skills to have as a department lead or a project manager is clear and concise project management that is effective. This will keep those working on the project more goal oriented while completing objectives and tasks, but it also gives those with oversight a good idea of the project’s progress and status.
Project management is not always easy for managers to handle on their own, but luckily there are applications that can help make their job easier.
Krozu is the most effective business tool to help with project management, business workflow, and time clock tracking. This is feasible because Krozu has features and capabilities that other project management applications simply do not offer.
Project Management Features of Krozu
Krozu takes into account that project management often involves multiple people doing different tasks to work towards a common goal. This is why hierarchical project organization is one of the key features incorporated into the project management capabilities of Krozu.
Project management often revolves around a team with a manager that provides others with roles and responsibilities to easily keep track of tasks and all progress being made. A team member will typically report to a project manager, someone who is in charge of a specific project within a department for a company. Eventually, information these project managers have will work its way up to provide information to a CEO or owner of a business so that they know the status of all projects and tasks being worked on.
No business owner has the time or energy to micromanage every aspect of their company, but Krozu makes project oversight easier with a visual hierarchical structure. This structure that an owner or project manager would have access to is known as a project tree within Krozu
This project tree is designed to be granularized so that a goal can be reduced down into smaller projects and tasks, which can be tracked and monitored by assigned project managers with set permissions and oversight that only they can have.
Team members assigned to a specific project will only be able to view and work on tasks that they have access to.
Projects trees are organized by three main features of Krozu:
Boards
These are the individual projects that managers and members
are working on within an assigned project tree.
Lists
A visual representation of progress that will be happening on a specific board.
Lists can further be categorized into groups.
Cards
Each task that a project manager or team member would need to know the status or progress of.
One point to note is that cards can be recursed into a Board while still keeping the same positioning within the parent Board.
Therefore becoming both a Card and a Board allowing for further division into smaller tasks.
All of these elements make it easy and appealing to look over the different parts of a larger project at hand. Keep in mind that it will also be a visual way to make sure that everyone has access to the same information as long as they have the permission level to do so, established by the project manager.
Another main feature of Krozu that goes a long way with project management and project oversight is the incorporation of time clock tracking. There are many instances where a business owner or client will need to know how many hours were spent on a particular task or where a person had used most of their hours for the day.
This will help a project manager determine the progress with a task at hand, but it can also be incorporated into payroll and billable hours.
There have been many schools of thought as to how project management can be defined and broken down. The most common project management methodologies are waterfall, agile, Hybrid and many more. Today however, it is most common to see many organizations using waterfall methodology such as Project management institute (PMI) which breaks a project down into five phases or steps to make the process streamlined.
Korzu can help with each phase of the modern project management process, and it will go hand and hand with team members and project managers looking to have a firm grasp on their tasks and goals for any situation.
• Project Initiation – The first stage of project management involves establishing the framework of an idea or goal. It should be established early on what the goal of a project is, and this is done best by defining what needs to be done.
In Krozu, this can happen when a project manager creates a new board for their team members in a specific project tree that they have access to.
Project Planning – Once a team or individual knows what the goal is of their workload, they can continue with making progress by further planning for their project.
It is not advised that a team or individual moves forward with completing their goal without some sort of outline schedule. It will only make completing the goal harder, and make it more difficult to have a firm foundation on project management.
Krozu has several features that make project planning easier for all who are assigned to a specific board: Forms, Custom Tags and Checklists.
Forms allow for the inclusion of many types of data that are pertinent to the specific task. This form will follow this card throughout its milestone trajectory
Custom tags can be assigned to any task or project, differentiated by an unlimited color spectrum and key words to help keep a project and all those involved on track and focused.
Checklists like that of custom tags can be assigned an unlimited number of items to any task or project. This ensures that all ideas and actions are completed when working towards the end goal of the project, as defined during the planning phase of project management.
• Project Execution – Now that a project’s scope has been determined, and a project manager and their team members have a good idea of how to handle the situation with ample planning, it is time to actually do the work towards achieving a goal or task on the project.
Workflow is essential to any project, and Krozu can help make workflow much more efficient with some of the features previously mentioned, such as the three main features of project trees (Boards, List, and Cards).
• Project Monitoring and Controlling – While work is being done to complete specific tasks and goals, a project manager is going to want to monitor the progress as it is being made. This ensures that the project is being executed as intended when it was established during the planning phase.
Monitoring is also an important part of project management because it may catch issues or problems that need to be fixed in order to optimize a project, or have better results when completing a task or goal.
While Krozu is more than capable of showing progress visually, it is also important to have control and monitoring in real time.
Krozu has Sub-Channel messaging so that project managers can communicate with team members, and they can communicate among themselves to provide feedback on a specific task or goal of the project.
Task Comments is another useful feature where team members and project managers can leave important information and feedback. This can be more than just commentary, but also contain attachments such as reports, spreadsheets, images, and other documents related to the project.
• Project Closing/Completion – Completing a project or task is just as important as starting one, and the same amount of attention and focus needs to be considered in order to ensure that a client or management is happy with the end result.
Before a project can officially be completed, it is necessary to talk with the individual who is looking for the end result to ensure that all of their expectations and needs are met. This is why project monitoring is such an important step in the project management process.
A client or project manager will often want to see a detailed report of the work that had been done, and any other pertinent data that may provide additional information to see what work was done.