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Wow, that was a big piece of work! My team and I are tired, but so happy with the fact that we delivered a great result on time and on budget. I am very excited to announce the launch of our new website, which showcases our programs and offerings in such a beautiful way. Could I just say a big thank you and congratulations to all involved.
Projects are a very different kind of work to our day-to-day work. They are complex, long, involve other people and can be challenging to manage. But they are also very rewarding, and I believe, can be some of the most impactful work we can do.
As I reflect on how my team have managed the many moving parts of the website project, I know we needed to go beyond our normal planning and organising tool, namely Outlook. Of course we used Outlook to communicate, and organise our project meetings, and to manage our next step actions and priorities. Outlook was our foundation tool, and helped us to get stuff done, but it was complemented by three other tools that helped us to step back and see the bigger picture of the project, which is critical when managing complex work across a number of stakeholders.
One of the tools we used heavily was OneNote. This helped us to keep any critical project information in a shared notebook that was always close at hand for the whole team. We did not use OneNote to file every piece of information about the project, but did store critical contracts, designs and meeting notes that were referenced regularly throughout the project.
MS Teams was another tool that was used to hold online project meetings, summarise notes and actions, and have informal chats about the project work without getting bogged down in countless email chains.
But probably the most useful project tool we used was Microsoft Planner. This allowed us to create a project board listing all of the key tasks for the project in contextual groups. We could share this with the whole team, and use it to discuss actions, progress, delays and completion in a highly visual way.
The thing I love the most about using these programs and apps for a project like this is that they all talk to each other, and link together to create quite a seamless ecosystem of useful tools.
How much is your team utilising tools like these to manage and collaborate on your projects? They are all tools that are probably at your fingertips, so why not give them a go?