Any operations manager worth their salt knows visibility is essential when overseeing the operations of your projects. It’s important to have real time visibility to ensure you have your finger on the current pulse, and understand any moments when you have to pivot or escalate a task. Our software at Crows Nest allows you to keep your project on track with this information. Ensure your team finishes all their tasks on time and within budget and communicate this info all the way to the top of the chain. In this article, we’ll walk you through how it can help with your project’s visibility in real time.
Visibility
The Crows Nest platform enables project wide visibility throughout the project’s team and holistic lifeline. When you assign a task to a team member, you are both able to see the task, timeline, communication, and any associated materials. Stakeholders down the stream can also see project wide visibility of the estimated costs across the board, including contract managers, project managers, engineers, and your team members in procurement, production, and installation. Because these teams must have immediate and constant visibility of the project’s budget and monitor it as the project moves along, we created software that makes it easy for each department to see the statistics within their team and also across the entire project’s landscape.
Communication
Along with the need for visibility is communication. We all know information is completely useless unless it is communicated to each member of your various departments and teams. Inside the Crows Nest platform, each project includes a dedicated communication area with accurate time and date stamps. This way you can track communication, comments and tasks in real time without having to access numerous tools or applications or cross reference through many documents. We make it easy for you.
Note-Taking and Documentation
There is also an area to write down associated notes and access any necessary documentation. Document management further facilitates instant access to internally created and externally received communication. This means you can have a complete project-based communication record all in one place. You can see requests for approvals, form submittals (including real-time capturing of the sent and returned date) and a complete communication record. This will ensure communication of this real time visibility and protection should there be any delays or rejected/ reprioritized deliverables. As the project manager, you can even create custom notifications and alerts to ensure you are aware of the tasks and team members at any given moment.
Managing Subcontractors
If you’re managing subcontractors, you must also communicate with them or pair them with other internal team members or external subcontractors. Within each project, the Contact Functional Asset option enables the sharing of the various outside vendors or firms, their personnel, and any related contact information. This central database for estimators, project managers, and personnel saves you time as you don’t need to play a game of telephone for every detail or production status. There are so many people involved in each project and having immediate access to files and organization therein is key if you want the entire team to stay on task. As an additional benefit, this organization and communication detail helps you reduce meeting times, the amount of time expended to retrieve information from teammates, and any mistakes that could be made during the process. Additionally, since you are keeping all your team members on one piece of software, privacy and security issues are greatly mitigated. Rather than numerous employee-owned or subcontractor-owned documents floating around, you can know they’re safe and sound all in one place.
Everything in One Place
There are multiple statistics and pieces of communication you need to see at all times for your project to run smoothly. Gluing all the details together is an essential key to successful project management. The ease of seeing these details all in one place can ensure seamless project cohesion, as well as communication, documentation and, most importantly, execution. This real-time, accurate visibility can increasingly move your project forward, keeping you on time and on budget while instituting a single digital platform that enables the sharing of all critical information amongst team members and all of the project’s stakeholders; your project is building its base for success. Use this real-time visibility on all your projects and you’ll be guaranteed to be the most effective and powerful project manager you can be. Get started by scheduling your demo with our Crows Nest team today!