In today’s ever-evolving world, only the fastest-moving businesses thrive. When customer needs shift or business needs change, leading organizations are able to pivot rapidly to move in the right direction.
Indeed, agility is increasingly important in the business world—particularly because customers have more options at their disposal than ever before.
In the event that someone has a bad experience with a company, they are four times more likely to look for a substitute competitor—which is always just a quick search away. Understanding this perfectly, the best companies move quickly and are constantly testing and reassessing their approach to make sure they are giving their customers what they want every time.
It’s one thing to say you want to be agile. It’s quite another to fully embrace business agility and transform into a truly agile organization.
What Is Business Agility?
Like the name suggests, business agility refers to an organization’s ability to remain nimble in the face of an ever-changing market.
In the world of project management, one of the best ways to do that is by tracking and measuring ongoing progress with a project management dashboard. That way, you are able to keep tabs on all KPIs from one central location. This enables project managers to efficiently and effectively measure scope, budget, time, and resources whenever they need.
With a powerful project dashboard in place, project managers waste much less time on reporting—enabling them to spend more time completing tasks and driving projects forward.
Before we shine a light on how, specifically, project dashboards can empower organizations to improve business agility, let’s take a step back and get our terms straight.
What Is a Project Dashboard?
A project dashboard is an interface that enables project managers to quickly determine all of the key metrics and status updates that pertain to specific projects.
The best project dashboards are completely configurable, allowing project managers to track the metrics and KPIs that matter most to their unique organizations—and view the data in the most helpful way for their specific use case.
Such dashboards are also intuitive by design, making it easy for anyone to figure out their way around them. Leading project dashboards are also updated in real time and support seamless data transfer across the organization.
Improving Business Agility with a Project Dashboard
A robust project dashboard makes work more organized, accessible, and collaborative, which makes it easier for project teams to operate with agility. Here’s how.
1. Visibility into real-time project status
Instead of hopping from one platform to the next and trying to herd cats, project managers can simply consult a single source of truth—their real-time dashboard—whenever they are curious about the status of a particular project, whether they’re meeting milestones, how they’re measuring up against KPIs, and which projects need the most attention, among other things.
This makes it easier to meet deadlines, ensure resources are allocated correctly, and keep projects under budget. As needs change, project managers can adjust priorities and resource allocation accordingly, operating with agility along the way.
2. More efficient teams
The right project dashboard makes cross-team collaboration easy. All pertinent data is stored in one place that’s updated in real-time and accessible to all members of the team. Instead of tracking down a manager to ask questions and find answers, employees can access the dashboard at their own convenience to find the information they’re looking for—whether that’s tasks, documents, calendars, discussions, polls, or something else.
Further, dashboards enable project managers to track document versions and responses, giving them a historical look at each project.
Add it all up, and communication improves, teams become more efficient, and more gets done in less time.
3. Informed decisions
Business agility is all about using up-to-date data to figure out the best way forward.
With access to a real-time project dashboard, it’s easier than ever to manage tasks, see where things stand, and see where the most pressing priorities lie. This enables project managers to make the best decisions at the right times, helping their organizations enjoy better business outcomes along the way.
Is Your Business Operating with Agility?
Getting ahead in today’s competitive business environment requires organizations to operate with agility. On the flip side, when companies are stuck in their ways and can’t pivot quickly, there’s a good chance that they will churn customers away by doing things the market no longer desires.
By investing in a real-time project dashboard, however, project managers are able to access the data they need when they need it. They can then use that information to inform the best way forward.
The end result is a project management team that becomes a well-oiled machine—pushing the organization forward faster, and in the right direction.
To learn more about how your enterprise can benefit from a real-time project management dashboard, check this out.
