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Transcript

Good communication is critical to project success. Stakeholders who could pull the plug on the project need to understand that the project is on target and that issues are being dealt with properly. If a project is in trouble, what鈥檚 being done to get it back on track? All people assigned to tasks need to clearly understand what they鈥檙e expected to do and not to do. You need to avoid scope creep. Don鈥檛 waste time and money doing more than the project calls for. Don鈥檛 endanger the project by doing less than is needed or by ignoring potential problems. Your project team can help you with these things if your communication channels are working for you. And don鈥檛 forget to pay attention to all reporting fields your upper management is monitoring to make sure that they have an accurate picture of your project status. In this video, you will learn how to communicate with all project stakeholders using good project planning, updates, task status and percent complete, issues and reports. Use descriptions or custom fields to make sure expectations are clear. Don鈥檛 be afraid to explain the goal of each task. Don鈥檛 micromanage, but err on the side of clarity rather than brevity. If you鈥檙e going to assign multiple people to a task, make sure they all understand who鈥檚 doing what. Consider using sub-task each assigned to a single person to avoid confusion, like this.

Set up a way to keep stakeholders outside of the project informed. Often upper management is keeping an eye on many projects. Find out what they鈥檙e wanting to know and how often they want updates. Then make sure that you鈥檙e regularly updating the things they鈥檙e watching.

And plan from the beginning to have a lessons learned meeting when the project is over so you can plan future projects better.

Workfront makes it easy for the project team to keep all communications about the project in a single place. The project, ask questions in the update section of relevant task, issue or documents. These comments roll up to the project level.

Include all people who need to be part of the discussion when needed, whether they are part of the project team or not. Best practice is to have notifications set up to send people an email when they get an update from a project. They should always click the link in the email notification to join the discussion in the project. This way, all discussions relating to the project are stored in one place. As the project manager, how do you know the real status of the work being done on your project? Before getting Workfront, you might鈥檝e had to go around to each worker and just ask them, or maybe you told everyone to send you a status report each Friday, or maybe you had a weekly status meeting where everyone could take a turn to talk about what they were working on. Workfront can change all that. If you can get all the workers to just update their task status and percent complete in Workfront on a regular basis, this saves everyone time, but it may take a little time and some reminders to get everyone in the habit. How much accuracy are you looking for? If you want real-time reporting to show you status accurate to within one week, then having everyone update their task and issues weekly will do it. If you need accuracy to the day, you鈥檒l need daily updates. One technique that might help you here is to create short, specific tasks. It鈥檚 easier for someone to accurately report they鈥檙e 100% complete with a two-day task than to have a good idea when they鈥檙e 20% complete on a 10-day task. When you assign a worker a task, by default they have the ability to create sub-tasks and organize their efforts. Encourage workers to do this, and it will make both organizing and status reporting much easier. What should someone do on the project team if they have a question or a concern about the project? As a project manager, you need to decide what you want them to do and make it clear to everyone on the team. For example, you might say, if it鈥檚 a question relating to the task, just tag me in the task update. That way the question and the reply become part of the record. If the question is about additional project work, I may ask you to create an issue. After review, the issue may be converted to a task and planned into the project timeline. Typically, issues are things that may eventually become a task or things that may be assigned to someone else to look into. As a project manager, you鈥檒l wanna keep an eye on your issues list, even if they鈥檙e not assigned to anyone in particular. One major difference between an update and an issue is that an issue has to be resolved before the project can be completed where an update does not. Also, updates can get lost in a flood, kind of like emails, but issues will stay in your face until you resolve them. Here鈥檚 an example of a project report. It includes some basic metrics about the project, including the condition update field. This is a native field that includes the project condition field and the most recent update made at the project level by the project owner. A lot of project managers make it a point to give a brief summary of the project鈥檚 progress in this update so that they can easily be seen in this report to upper management. If you鈥檙e doing this, you just wanna make sure as a project manager that you don鈥檛 put updates at the project level unless you intend them to be seen in this report. In the updates area, you鈥檒l have threads that鈥檒l be compressed and you can click here to show all of the comments within them. So if you鈥檙e searching for updates and you have a lot to look at, it can be a little difficult to find what you鈥檙e looking for. So if you鈥檙e looking for a particular word, a screen search won鈥檛 find them if they鈥檙e embedded in a thread. However, there is a report you might wanna use. It鈥檚 called Note Search. This report quickly finds updates based on a variety of filter prompts. It will search within update threads and quickly extract anything that meets the criteria specified in the prompts.

If you run it without any prompts, it鈥檒l just show you all of the comments in your project.

If you鈥檙e interested in a report like this, there are step-by-step instructions included in the activity in Create a Task Report Tutorial.

You can add this to one of your project tabs like we did by following the instructions in an activity report. By following the instructions in an activity in the Create Dashboards Tutorial.