Blog Highlights
- Project collaboration becomes an issue when the PM is stuck as the “integration layer” bridging the gaps between disconnected tools, spread sheets, email, task managers, file shares and the.
- Bad collaboration isn’t only a communications problem. Poor collaboration means it’s not systems. We don’t bring tasks, timelines, files, resources, and financials under one roof.
- Project collaboration software keeps projects, people, budget, timeline, and tasks together for seamless move from coordination to action.
- AI resource management can revolutionize team collaboration by telling you not just that somebody’s available, but also that they’re the right person for the job based on their skills, workload, past performance, and even price tag.
- Kytes ties project collaboration to outcomes by consolidating tasks, timesheets, resources, financials, dashboards, communication and integrations into a single layer of execution.
What Project Lifecycle Management Software Must Do
A project manager in an IT services company explained a habit her team repeatedly failed to break. “Every project starts well. We plan in great detail for initiation.
By the time we get to the execution phase, however, reality veered from the project plan in a disconnect somewhere between planning and execution.”
Her team wasn’t trying to let the project get out of control. They were doing the work but didn’t have the connected system that connected the dots between planning and execution to help with decisions through the execution phases. “This left the next planning phases partly blind. Then the next project had similar issues because of lost information.
It repeats on and on.
Most organizations do not yet have Project Lifecycle Management Software and instead use an assortment of separate tool applications”.
Why Most Projects Lose Control Between Phases — Not Within Them
For most IT services organisations, stage to stage project transitions are informal. Your plan from the planning phase gets e-mailed round. The lesson’s learned file from the last project exists no one has opened for months. Risk decisions made in the initiation phases go undiscovered during the execution phases. Team’s log their progress in multiple software systems not connected in any shape or form.
The outcomes are not dramatic failures. They are invisible obstacles. The milestones drift a fraction and resource changes happen without explanation. The same processes get reinvented (badly, each time) as the last project had already proved and failed.
The fact is, we haven’t changed our approach because none of the existing project management software has joined up the projects across their full life cycle.
What Connecting Every Phase of the Project Lifecycle Actually Requires
The correct lifecycle management platform ensures that the lessons learned from an engagement carry over to future projects. It moves risk management decisions from initiation to monitoring and control. The platform connects the project plan created in the planning phase to the resource plan executed during implementation.
You can see project activity at every phase in the same window, not glued together at 4 PM on a Friday afternoon.
It is also where project governance tools are vital. Governance is not an admin chore, but rather the set of mechanisms designed to guarantee that every phase makes its way along the correct approval chain and that every task reaches the right person at the appropriate level of quality prior to subsequent activity commencing. Without such controls, your team is governing through informal processes, which results in inconsistent results. Process automation for your projects automates those manual handoffs from phase to phase and provides those sequential, system-triggered workflows.
You shouldn’t need someone to remember to author a specific file at the start of the planning phase to be able to initiate that phase – that should occur as the result of a completed initiation phase workflow.
How Kytes Manages the Full Project Lifecycle
The initiation period includes an opportunity & estimation module that sets budget, scope & resource estimates prior to commitment. The planning period builds structure by linking together WBS, project plan & milestones, alongside risk management. The execution phase syncs project tasks, timesheets & project finance at real-time; Monitoring & Control highlights risks via dashboards that every team and PMO head will open up in their standard view to view real-time trends.
The Kytes platform instills automation in every aspect of the project lifecycle.
Automatic reminders for timesheet entry are in-built. Automatically assign a team, allocate resources, and automatically track status updates. Automated approval routing means less chase, automated risk escalations mean teams never miss a milestone; Team members stay on the tasks at hand & worry less about the process. Approval process & risk escalations are a part of the solution’s foundation to the framework as the Kytes framework includes phases with clearly set approval checkpoints, who can sign off each phase and under which criteria; this allows stakeholders to easily approve/ reject milestones which could also trigger alternative processes.
Kytes serves IT and engineering services, pharma and generics, CRO, CDMO, EPC, and GCC organisations. In each vertical, the project management lifecycle has different stage requirements. Kytes configures to those requirements — not the other way around.
Stop Losing Context Between Phases
It is not the team if your project team continues to lose context from phase to phase. It is the tools. Find out how Kytes integrates all the phases, and what that signifies for projects, margin and the pace of project delivery.
Frequently Asked Questions
