Automation has been a boon for companies in today’s increasingly competitive business environment, where customers constantly demand less processing time, efficient operations, and shorter delivery times. Minimizing the amount of time and energy employees spend on repetitive or low-value tasks is what automation is all about.
The purpose of automation is to offload any manual, time-consuming and repetitive work from you and your team so that you can spend your time doing more valuable and strategic work. Automation opens us up to rewarding challenges instead of tedious tasks. Leading companies are already using automation in project management to achieve more with less.
Project management automation refers to implementing software solutions that can complete basic tasks and functions as per the team’s project plan without human intervention.
Which project management tasks should be automated?
Automation optimizes and completes a predefined process for you. To make the most out of the implementation, it is necessary to ensure that the automated activities are consistent and repeatable. If the workflow is not already smooth, automating it can worsen by giving rise to application incompatibility errors.
For example, if your team has a structured process for resource allocation, you can automate it to assign tasks to team members based on the task type, priority, and employee skill sets. If your existing resource allocation process is not conditionally structured, an automated version of it could end up assigning tasks to people not qualified to complete them, creating dependencies or causing a host of other problems.
If you’re considering incorporating automation into your project management process, you can use the following checklist to understand where it can be most effective:
- What are the most manual and time-consuming administrative tasks your team members spend time on?
- Which of your project processes are well-documented and mapped to the timeline?
- Which project tasks are consistently repeated with minimal variation?
- Which repeated activities in your project plan do not need any human supervision?
How you answer these questions concerning your project will help you pinpoint where automation can benefit your project and business.
The most popular ways of incorporating automation in project management are:
- Creating and assigning tasks for project activities
- Assigning raised issue tickets to team members
- Sending reminders and notifications based on project timelines and deadlines
- Review and approval process for all completed work, along with the employee’s reporting manager or project manager
- Sending timely task updates for multi-team or cross-functional team projects
- Identifying bottlenecks in the project activities
What are project management apps?
Project management applications are computer programs that help people involved in the project management process to initiate, plan, execute, monitor, and close projects of any size and type. Project management application software is designed to prepare and document project tasks, build schedules and timelines, solve project issues, manage risks, assign budgets, establish collaboration between project participants, control quality, assemble project teams and organize human resources.
Asana is one of the most popular project management tools used widely across industries. It is designed to simplify team-based work management by helping teams organize, track, and manage their tasks effectively.
Some commonly used integrations with Asana for project management are:
· Create a new task in Asana tasks when you receive a labeled email via Gmail
· Add new Asana tasks to Airtable
· Create a new task on Asana on the addition of a new Mailchimp subscriber
You can also integrate Asana with GitHub, a leading code hosting platform for version control and collaboration. To know how to connect Asana tasks with GitHub, watch this video.
Automation is the key to enabling people to work smarter rather than harder.
Contrary to popular belief, automation isn’t going to steal our jobs. Instead, it will play an essential role in helping individuals streamline their work, have higher work satisfaction and lesser chances of burnouts due to mundane, repetitive tasks. Get in touch with Quickwork to know more about automation and how you can implement it in your daily project activities.
