When it comes to those busy times of the year; holiday seasons, the end of the financial year, or even a larger number of employees looking to take annual leave, then there are a number of considerations that you need to make when it comes to the management of your project team.
Ensure You Have Cover In Place
It is essential to ensure that you have the right levels of cover in place within your team at all times, particularly during these busy periods. If you plan for this well enough in advance, you can write it into your project plan to ensure that each element of the plan should hopefully have reached an appropriate point, therefore allowing you to deal with a reduced number of team members much more efficiently. Ensuring that all of your team members keep their paperwork up to date so that everyone knows exactly where the project is up to will make it easier to see what levels of cover you might need. Project manager courses will cover some of the ways in which you can ensure that you have the necessary cover in place.
Do Meetings Need To Be In Person?
At some point during your training for project managers there is a good chance that you will have heard the phrase “could this meeting have been an email?” and this is never more important that during those busy times for your project team. A good way of saving valuable time during those particularly busy periods is to change some of your meetings to emails. This will allow you to provide your team with all the essential information that they require without taking them away from the work that they are doing. They will be able to read your email update when they have a convenient time between tasks. Keeping things written down in this way will also give you a valuable written record of what has been said and any replies that you might get.
If an email isn’t appropriate for the type of meeting you need, then you should also consider if your in-person meeting could be a zoom meeting instead. This will allow you to have real time conversations but without taking people away from their desks. Virtual meetings are becoming increasingly popular and are a good solution for those project teams where team members work from home, are based in different countries or simply in different offices.
Are You Inviting The Right People?
During busy times the last thing you want to do is waste peoples time. All too often, it can be the easiest option to invite everyone to a meeting. However taking some time to ensure that you are inly inviting those team members who are relevant to the discussion will ensure that you are using your resources to the best of your ability. Not only does the attendance of those who don’t need to be involved in a meeting mean that you are wasting their time, but it can also be disruptive to their workflow which is something that it is a good idea to avoid.
