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The 3 Outdated Project Management Approaches You Must Avoid

Project managers need to constantly adapt, adopt, and improve their project management approaches. In this ultra-competitive corporate era, the importance of adopting cost effective and efficient task management approaches cannot be emphasized enough. It’s important for project managers to avoid outdated approaches that do nothing but create all sorts of delays, dissonance, and cost overruns.

Let’s look at three outdated project management approaches that are still being used but should be avoided in the future.

1. Using Spreadsheet to Manage Project Timeline and Deliverables

While spreadsheet software such as MS Excel are effective for managing certain aspects of a project , they are not efficient in managing them.  You can use a spreadsheet to create a budget and project timeline. However, as the project number of project deliverables and factors increase, their effectiveness reduces.

An online collaboration software, on the other hand, makes it easier to work and manage almost any size and type of projects. You can use a work collaboration tool to more efficiently manage the teams and resources. Online project management software allows you to work on real time data. Plus you can collaborate with employees working from different locations. Workers can connect remotely and easily update the accounts. This way, the information will always be up-to-date and accurate. This is something that is not possible when using spreadsheet software. 

2. Carrying on Status Meetings

Conducting status meetings is another ineffective and outdated project management activity that kills productivity of the team. The reality is that meetings take a lot of time. They drain precious time resources. And since time is money for the firm, the wasted time represents cost wastages.

It’s much better to use collaboration software to remain up-to-date about the project’s progress. Good team management software will show the status of the tasks on the dashboard. Using the software will also allow you to save precious time of the team spent on conducting status meetings.

While one-on-one interactions with the team members are important to motivate and gauge the temperature of the employees, they should not be used for getting an update on the project status. A work collaboration software will be better suited for the task.

3. Communicating with Team Using Email

One of the most outdated project management practices is using email to communicate with the team members.  Using email is an inefficient way to communicate with your team. The problem with this mode of communication is that the data is not centralize and the conversation is spread out over different email threads and you have tons of attachments. What’s more, they can easily become distracting and the regular checking, organizing, and deleting emails takes a lot of time that could otherwise be used for more productive activities. 

In conclusion, the outdated approach to project management can result in a great time wasting for the project team members. In order to save time and boost the productivity of the team members, it is advisable to make use of project management software. Using project management software is essential for effective and efficient management of projects that will ultimately have an improved impact on the company’s bottom-line.