Insights

While the COVID-19 pandemic may have precipitated many businesses and workers into working remotely for the first time, the virtual environment has been used for many years in the world of project planning. For this effort, finding the right project planning software to create the virtual graphical displays needed for project management activities, duration, and resources is of prime importance.

Performing the project planning needed for your company is far more difficult without effective planning software. Large-scale project planning involves a host of  constantly moving variables. Even smaller project planning brings tight deadlines that require excellent interfacing between team members.

There is a way to provide scheduling and project planning in a virtual environment with one constant that makes your company resources work together almost seamlessly. Read on to learn about five useful tips for creating and implementing a successful virtual project planning session. Each tip may highlight unique challenges, but all can be overcome effectively with the right virtual project management tool.

Virtual Project Planning

All professionals have no doubt experienced a common business dilemma previously: you have a project planning session needed, but your project stakeholders can’t meet in person. What do you do to access their crucial skills and expertise?

Technical tools and project management skills can be successfully navigated if you use these five effective tips for setting up a virtual project planning session. These tips include the best practices and processes for running a virtual project planning meeting.

#1 – Set Up a Virtual Interactive Project Execution Tools

A stable and useful virtual interactive project planning tool is indispensable. Optimally, your project planning tool will have a graphical display that loads activities and gives you estimates of project duration. It must also provide the resources you’ll need to pull it all together.

The right software project planning tool can make or break the interactive planning for any project. That’s why you must have a robust tool for your scheduling needs as well as the reports needed in project execution. You want to maintain your project timelines with a visual interface that makes it easy for all team members to review the schedule network and make adjustments when necessary. 

#2 – Track Work Output

A project is only as good as the quality of work performed. In project planning, you need a software tool that can track your team member’s productivity individually and as a unit. Every critical activity or path must be clearly visible to every team member. Being able to see the critical issues allows for the evaluation of the project in real-time.

If you need to address any alternative planning needs, you have the resource management scenarios to make it happen. Productivity assessments that are real-time and transparent help give you a virtual planning facilitator tool to help finalize your project. Tracking your virtual teams also allows you to adapt to changing requirements of even the most significant or complex projects. 

#3 – Ensure You Have Interface Capabilities

Graphical planning capabilities and an interface that makes your project planning almost intuitive are essential. Your schedules need to be implemented on time and with accuracy by key stakeholders and your team members. Using interface capabilities, you can schedule group activities by work area or business unit with team members.

There are always vital network paths that you’ll need to customize with multiple activities that show as ongoing on the same line. Ideally, you want a timescale built-in with your summary schedule. The summary schedule allows you to perform the micro-planning or time-sensitive turnarounds you need for successful project completion.

#4 – Define Process Control

Your process control tools and deliverables can make or break the success of your virtual project. You want your standard interactive workflow to reflect your roles and responsibilities as well as those of your team members. In tandem with these parameters, you want real-world conditions to be reflected in the activities within the total float range.

To this end, you do not constrain the float, but rather build a schedule that provides a retrospective schedule analysis. That means ideally you’ll be able to toggle your data modes, and you’ll have real-time schedule calculations. 

#5 – Implementation of a Standardized and Seamless System

The last tip is one of the most important. Successful virtual project planning requires a unique visual interface that is standardized and seamless. You want your whole team to be engaged in the success of your project. Your project planning software depends on its ability to deliver an interactive planning-centric experience.

Virtual collaboration works best when delivered through a logic-driven schedule from the same software tool that’s used for planning and provides a specific process for suggestions, building, testing, and documentation for almost every virtual project. Virtual teams often have people who work in their own way using their own systems without integrating or interfacing effectively.

That can never happen if you give your team a standardized and seamless system that provides documentation and is refined for the virtual project purpose.

Moving Forward with the Best Virtual Project Management Tools

In every industry, each day in business brings new challenges that require specific processes for everything from building to testing. A virtual project planning session may be conducted in many ways. But there’s only one way to do it effectively and efficiently.

Every company recognizes the need to establish enhanced capabilities for virtual project planning sessions. Finding the right software tool that will integrate process control with seamless interfacing software may seem like a long shot. Reach out to PMA Technologies when you’re ready to beat these odds and provide effective project planning management that will save you time, money, and effort.

When you need your virtual and complex project plan to stay on track for success, PMA Technologies delivers what you need. Project managers who direct virtual interactive planning sessions with PMA Technologies’ NetPoint software preserve the integrity of their projects while establishing an organized system that drives you and your team successfully forward.