Project Leaders: Here Are 3 Signs Your Remote Project Managers Are Overwhelmed with Technology
Overwhelmed project managers. They are not hard to find. And if you look closely, you’ll probably find a few right within your organization. As it is, project management is stressful — delivering projects on time, on budget, and within scope while dealing with limited resources, frequently changing client expectations, and a never-ending task list is not easy. Now, adding to these challenges is the new normal: remote work.
Business leaders turn to mobile technology to overcome common remote project management challenges and make a project manager’s life easier. But with the increasing number of tools and software available, chances are that your remote project managers are facing tech overload — the pressure to adopt and utilize those tools — which leads to burnout.
How do you know if your managers are facing burnout in this tech-enabled environment? Here are three signs you need to look for:
Sign #1: Project Managers Are Having a Hard Time Making Tough Remote Project Management Decisions
Every day, project managers need to make data-driven, timely, and effective decisions. They need to weigh all the available options to pick the best course of action. But, with increasing numbers of online software applications, the data needed to make critical decisions are getting scattered across platforms — leaving managers with incomplete and inaccurate information.
Sign #2: Remote Project Managers Are Not Able to Foresee Potential Problems
Remote project managers need real-time insights into projects, resources, and financials to anticipate problems before they derail deadlines and budgets. When managing and collaborating with team members in different locations and time zones, managers need a single view to track the project status and quickly identify potential bottlenecks. Pulling reports from multiple sources and then spending hours to make sense of that data is highly time-consuming and inefficient.
Sign #3: Project Managers Feel Disconnected Due to Communication Inconsistency
Project managers need to constantly communicate with other team members (and the tools they use) to streamline processes. For instance, they interact with the sales team to understand which deals in the CRM are ready for closure so they can be moved to the project pipeline. When this critical information doesn’t come in a timely manner, it’s hard to get everyone on the same page to ensure consistent execution and growth. And when a variety of communication tools may be used across your organization, it can lead to missed messages and incorrect information being shared.
Solution: Establish a Single Source of Truth for All Your Project, Resources, and Finance-Related Data
As remote work has become the new normal, most project leaders are beginning to realize they need a better, more mobile way to manage their projects, people, time, and profits. Though relying on multiple tools and technologies to enable online teams and fill the gaps may seem like a great solution at first, it can quickly become a data nightmare for project managers. Your managers have information, but the knowledge is slipping through the cracks. Disparate systems mean your managers don’t have the trustworthy information they need to do their jobs. Misunderstandings, delays, and frustrations mean they’re losing productivity, morale, and revenue.
How to get this problem under control? It all starts with a single source of truth.
The 2019 Project Controls Survey Report reveals that only 33 percent of respondents have access to a single source of project data and less than 10 percent said that their systems were “fully integrated.”
Professional Services Automation (PSA) software is a full-suite software that can replace all of your point solutions spread across various groups and teams. It combines the capabilities of project management, resource management, time tracking, finance and billing, business intelligence, collaboration tools, and more to give managers insight into project progress, upcoming needs, talent availability, skills required, cost, and all project-related data available across departments and functions.
A cloud-based, self-driving PSA provides global businesses with a centralized, scalable, single source of truth for all their project information, enabling project managers to gain control over projects, resources, costs, pay, and billing. Seamless integration with other online tools you use like CRM, HCM, ERP, and more ensures that accurate and up-to-date data automatically flows into all the tools you use.
From project management and resource allocation to billing and financial management, PSA enables managers to support every part of the project lifecycle — all in a single software.
So how does remote project management technology like a PSA solution help overcome project manager tech burnout in each of the three signs above?
- It enables easy and faster decision-making: A PSA solution does all the heavy lifting by analyzing real-time data to recommend the best possible choices for managers to decide from. And since the data is always up-to-date, recommendations are made considering even the last minute changes.
- It empowers managers to respond to problems even before they arise: A top PSA solution generates insights that lead to agile responses and rapidly getting and keeping resources, projects, and finances on track and optimized. It automatically updates information on your projects, resources, and financials, providing the true pulse of your business to take necessary action.
- It provides faster, accurate, and up-to-date project-related data: A PSA solution harvests data from users and systems to deliver real-time visibility into the organization’s work, so there are no data silos. It operates in harmony with all other software and applications your organization uses. For instance, Polaris directly pulls relevant data from CRM to enable managers to plan all key project elements. The strong integration capabilities makes it easy for sharing project, resource, time, costs, and billing information with your ecosystem to enable leaders in their decision-making.
Your remote project managers don’t need to operate in a state of isolation and tech burnout. Using a full-service PSA product like Polaris can alleviate the overload of multiple programs and tools that are so often used at many businesses, especially when working remotely.
Explore more about Polaris and how it can reduce tech overload at your organization by streamlining data and creating a single source of truth for all project-related data.
