Collaboration tools have many benefits – everyone you work with can communicate easily, share documents and access resources from anywhere using any device. While all these may greatly improve the way you and your team manage your work, there’s an additional advantage such tools can have – stakeholder management.
Any work or project you undertake will no doubt have several people, both inside and outside your organization, who have an interest in seeing it succeed. As such, there are many people who will want a view as to how a project is running, not just the people involved in working on it every day. But according to the survey in our ‘Everyone is a project manager’ report, that information is not always readily available or easy to have at hand. In fact, 40% of workers say that work information is not easily accessible and data is difficult to share. This is especially true if you are working with a large team; it can be very easy to lose track of the progress of some activities.
Fortunately, collaboration tools can easily generate up-to-the-minute information about what people are working on, making reporting to stakeholders far less of a daunting prospect. Teams can create dashboards that give stakeholders the overviews they need. It also reinforces the genius of Kanban boards because they do so much towards visualizing the status of various tasks. Likewise, Gantt charts remain a powerful tool to pinpoint milestones and provide an at-a-glance, a top line overview of how work and projects are progressing in relation to the plan and timelines.
It’s great to have everyone on your team collaborating and communicating effectively. Keep your stakeholders in the loop on how this benefits them and the business outcomes they are looking for. I invite you to read our Survival Guide Series for Successful Work Management to get more tips for how to better report to the wider business.
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