Ever wished you had a superpower? Perhaps the ability to see through walls in meetings? Perhaps the ability to teleport yourself to different locations to support your virtual team members?
Personally, I would rather know what my team was doing than have to chase them – maybe that’s a mindreading superpower.
To supercharge your project, you don’t necessarily need to have a superpower. To know what your team members are doing, you don’t have to be a mind reader. You only need modern, reliable systems that allow you to do your job more effectively.
What is a Work OS?
Work operating system (workOS), an online tool for managing your work, is an online tool that allows you to work as you like.
Teams today need flexible solutions that allow them to manage project and nonproject work in one tool. They also require fast workflows that eliminate the tedious tasks.
A work OS is the best way to get your work done, no matter what it looks like. It acts as a hub connecting managers, teams, and their work. You can simply take a look at the project status and see everything.
Complex Projects Require Robust Tools
My mentor and I spent some time together recently trying to figure out the best tech for her business. Because her agile project leader wanted to use it, she was leaning towards monday.com.
However, as someone who works with predictive projects, it was difficult for her to leave behind the Gantt-driven tools that she’d been trained to use throughout her career.
I see this problem often from that person. They like the tools they have, don’t want another one, and don’t want some of the features that they rely on in Gantt charts.
Gantt charts are controversial because of my love for them. A school of thought holds that you should manage people’s time and not the project. This is semantics for me. Only people who spend their time on the right things can deliver the project.
Both of these are possible in an environment. People are your most unpredictable resource. It is important to help them manage their time. The work they need to complete must still be visualized on a large scale so everyone can see the bigger picture. Sometimes a Gantt chart is helpful when you are working on large-scale construction projects or multi-phase projects.
Don’t get it wrong, I love my Kanban charts! Some work OS tools even have a Kanban view so you can access it when you need. They are just for different types of work.
Modern work OS systems aim to create space in the workplace that is accessible for all types of work.
Let’s get back to my client. We settled on a hybrid solution. The monday.com OS for work was integrated with her existing tools. Monday.com integrates seamlessly with Trello and Jira, Google Drive, Todoist, and many other tools.
She could use a Gantt chart of enterprise-grade quality for projects that required it outside of Work OS and integrate the results into monday.com.
You can create your perfect software suite by integrating and automating between tools, reducing the need to enter data twice.
Make it easy for your team
My role as a project manager is to make it easy to my team to do their best work. I remove roadblocks and protect them from office politics. I manage stakeholder conflict and let them get on with their work. My tools have an impact on how easy it is to work on my projects.
I created mini-timelines in a spreadsheet for each workstream on a project. Each workstreamowner had their own spreadsheet listing the work to be done and the dates it had to be completed (they had already set their dates; I just typed them up). It was very simple for them. They did it.