How to Manage a Project From Start to Finish With monday.com
Now that you know what goes into end-to-end project management, we’ll show you how one of our favorite project management platforms, monday.com (here’s our monday.com review), can help you plan and organize a project, manage tasks, communicate with team members and stakeholders and help you deliver your project on time.
1. Create a Project Charter
A project manager must create a project charter or scope. Creating a basic project plan is easy on monday.com, as they offer a template to help get you started. To complete it, you fill in the blank fields, which include defining project objectives, performance metrics, cost analysis, team members and stakeholders and more.
The template auto-calculates cost estimates once you enter projected totals for each category. Once completed, the plan can be handed to executives who will deny or green-light the project. Once approved, you can hold a kick-off meeting with the stakeholders and your project team.
2. Create a RACI Chart and Assign Roles and Responsibilities
A RACI chart is an easy-to-read tool that gives a visual representation of your team and what they are responsible for. You can download a RACI chart template for monday.com that makes creating one straightforward.
To create your chart, you enter the job roles your project needs, and you create columns entitled Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed. Next, you enter a list of responsibilities. You then assign staff members as responsible, accountable, consulted and informed for each role and task.
Not only does this chart show who is responsible for a specific job, but it also shows who they report to (accountable), another subject matter expert who can give advice (consulted) and who needs to be kept in the loop, such as a stakeholder (informed). You can learn more about RACI charts in our RACI chart guide.
3. Plot Your Project Timeline in a Gantt Chart
Another essential step in the planning phase is creating a project timeline. The best way to do this is with a Gantt chart. To create a project timeline, you’ll need to enter project milestones (a specific point or event in a project) and every task that needs to be completed to reach those milestones and finish the project overall.
When you create tasks on monday.com (or most other project management platforms), you can enter the task and a description of what needs to be done. You can assign start and due dates and set the task status. Managers can also upload files that support the job and leave comments for the designated team member.
After all task information has been entered, the tasks will appear on the Gantt chart. You’ll then have a visual representation of each task that shows when it’s due and when you need to hit each milestone in your project.
4. Assign Tasks to Team Members
Now that you have created every task for the project, it’s time to assign team members to the tasks. To assign a job, go to the Kanban view and click on the task that needs to be assigned. Once you do this, a task card panel will appear. On monday.com, all you need to do is click person and then select the correct team member from the drop-down menu.
5. Monitor Project Progress With Dashboards and Reports
Once your project is underway, you must keep track of your team members, budgets, and due dates. One of the most efficient ways to do this is with dashboards that can display multiple project metrics in one place.
Dashboards are highly customizable. The dashboard on monday.com can display multiple widgets that can show task information, updates for individual team members and your project timeline. You can also display budget information, time spent on tasks, workloads, and more. Be sure to set up dashboards so you can have quick access to critical information.
6. Ensure Team Communication and Collaboration
It’s crucial to remain in contact with your team throughout the life cycle of the project. There are many ways to achieve this. On monday.com, you can leave comments on task cards. You can also use integrations to connect to chat apps like Slack, Zoom and Google Chat. No matter which method you choose, you must be in constant contact with your team.
7. Close the Project
The final phase of the end-to-end management method is closing the project. Project managers must ensure that every task associated with the project is complete and that any late change requests from stakeholders and the client have been met.
Once all tasks have been signed off, the project leader should hold a retrospective meeting with the team so that they can discuss wins and losses and receive feedback about their work. At the end of this meeting, the project manager also thanks and releases the team to work on other projects.