Are you familiar with these guidelines? Hey, this project is going to be huge, but we don’t have budget and the timeline is super short… Having the digital culture, such projects won’t surprise you anymore.
Even when the challenge looks like Mission Impossible, there are simple digital project management hacks you can use. At a time where you’re supposed to be “agile” and the good old Kanban project management asks for too much time, these hacks will help you save time and be more efficient.
1. Automate as much as possible
Using marketing automation platforms will help you save considerable amounts of time in your digital project management. Needless to be the superhero of automation: just use simple workflows to automate only what you need.
A good example for that is that if you finally use 4 to 5 different digital tools, automations will save you precious time by synchronising them or triggering common updates.
2. Daily talk and brief
One simple hack for your digital project management is also to start each day with a daily talk. Forget about long meetings and workshops, just use the firs 15 minutes of the day to brief your team about the status of the project.
3. Learn to say no
When you suddenly master the next milestones, there’s always this person coming with last minute ideas. A key hack is simply to learn how to say no. It’s your project, your commitment, don’t let others turn it into a failure.
4. Stay away from distractions (notifications)
Being in a middle of high-demanding tasks, you’ll probably receive a bunch of 5 emails and 20 slack notifications. When working on your projects, try to multiply the slots where you can stay away from distractions and turn your notifications off.
5. Use opportunities to learn
There’s always place to learn, so during your project, if you have to dig into complementary knowledge bases, just do it. Sometimes, losing 15 minutes on learning other methods and techniques can help you save considerable amounts of time.
6. Educate your team
Your project is not a one-man show: it’s most of the time a team-work. During your digital projects, try to quickly identify the strengths and weaknesses in your team. Spending time educating people with weaknesses in certain domains will definitely raise the expertise of your team.
7. Know the key figures
Discussing about your project, you’re briefly asked by your peers “hey, how much time did you spend?” “what’s the cost?” “how much left?”…
All these basic questions should be already answered in your head. Having constantly in mind the key figures will help you decide on-the-go when decisions have to be made fast.
8. Avoid useless meetings
When it comes to short deadlines and actions, a lot of people will have this appeal and need for meetings. Well, let’s face it… the time spent in meetings is lost for actions. Try to avoid useless meetings as much as possible, and if you can’t, make them short.
9. Prioritise
Prioritising is obvious, and yet lots of projects fail to be on time because of this specific point.
Of course, you have amazing tools such as Wunderlist or Trello to help you prioritize your tasks. But when it comes to prioritising, we believe things should be easy and practical: just go with three lists, “urgent”, “medium”, “low priority”. Just doing that will help you see clearly.
10. Adapt
When you were a kid, you decided to build a rocket to go to the moon. Well, obviously, that didn’t happen and you moved on to something else…
Running a digital project is the same: along the way, you will often have to adapt based on results, iterations, difficulties… Try to constantly have that in mind to shape your project the most efficient way.
