7 Benefits of Visual Project Management Software
Visual work management is critical to speeding up your new product development projects. If your new product development teams are already comfortable with manual project boards, automating your product development project boards is the obvious next step and comes with many benefits.There are several tools that do the basics - getting your manual product development project boards online and available to remote teams such as Playbook, iObeya and LeanKit.
However, if you are looking to move beyond simple automation of project boards to project execution, you may want to look at Playbook where features like resource loading across projects is available. With that, here are seven benefits to electronic visual work management that are pretty hard to ignore.
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Multiple projects are visible simultaneously
All the project work that a person is working on is accessible and visible across the team and to management. With manual boards, an individual cannot easily see their own or anyone else's tasks across projects. This makes optimizing resources almost impossible.
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Remote product development teams are audible ready
Remote working is possible as team members have the same view of the project and can effectively participate in daily stand-ups. When changes are made in one location, everyone see them, regardless of where they are located.
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Impacts of plan, priority, and resource changes are available in real-time
Related to number 1 and 2, changes to the plan, priorities, and resources can be seen by all -- immediately. This means the team has the most up to date information at all times and can work on what is most valuable. This is not generally possible using digital sticky tools such as IObeya and LeanKit, but in Playbook the plan and the detailed tasks are integrated, so when today's tasks are updated, tomorrow's priorities are updated too.
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Project history is recorded
If you move a sticky note on a manual board you lose how far out the task has moved, when it was originally supposed to occur, and the impact to other tasks. Relationships between tasks and the work involved in each one isn't captured either. Additionally, manual boards are not automatically recording. So, when you are planning the same set of activities, you have to start from scratch.
The IP is also lost as there is no record of what worked and what didn't so that the next project can be planned and executed more effectively.
With electronic visual work management the project history is recorded as you make changes. Only with this additional history, can the plan be easily re purposed and refined for the next project.
Playbook combines project execution and planning so even more benefits can be realized. These high-level additional benefits are outlined below.
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Actual loading is visible across projects
In new product development most people are working across multiple projects. Playbook allows you to see when resources are overloaded and enables you to reallocate tasks or resources across projects. Digital sticky tools only show the number of stickies assigned to a person, which an inaccurate picture of the real load.
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Priorities are clear and correct across projects
Visual work management project execution tools like Playbook, where day to day detailed tasks are integrated with the overall project plan, enable individuals to see their number one priority task across projects every day. With Playbook your top task is automatically calculated based on criticality -- once again, across projects.
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Project execution and project planning are available in one convenient software view
Electronic visual work management with Playbook means that the overall plan as well as today's priority tasks are view able in the same convenient software -- one software tool for the entire team to access both the long term plan and today’s activities.
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