Meeting Project Manager needs

In project management, the main responsibility of the project manager is to ensure the project is delivered on time, within budget, and with high quality. This involves leading teams to reach milestones, overseeing planning and execution, strategising, and managing stakeholders. However, achieving this goal comes with its challenges. During our discussions, a Project Manager expressed frustration over the following challenges in achieving alignment:

• Lack of accountability and unclear delineation of roles and responsibilities.
• Lack of clarity regarding initiative ownership.
• Misalignment between agreed scope of work and the project plan.
• Lack of planning leading to confusion regarding project direction and project structure.
• Infrequent revisiting of planning leading to unrealistic expectation.

There are many other challenges we could delve into, but if these ones match your experience, keep reading to learn how Qanban tackles them to improve team alignment.

How Qanban solve your pain?

Qanban addresses alignment challenges comprehensively and simultaneously across various levels, aiming for complete end-to-end consistency and optimal alignment between organisational structure and the target operating model. With Qanban handling the heavy lifting, you can concentrate on your core responsibilities.

Alignment on program level

Within Qanban, you can assist senior leadership to organise projects into specific programs of work, ensuring alignment with overarching program goals. At the program level, Qanban offers insight into the program’s objectives, its current phase, priority, and the individual leading the program. Further down on project level, insight is provided to each project’s objectives, phase (e.g. Analysis & Concept, Planning, Execution, Control, Closure), priority (e.g. Urgent, High, Medium), and project lead, offering a consolidated view of initiative ownership.

Delving deeper into individual projects, you can review high-level progress at the epic level and identify individuals responsible for each epic, facilitating inquiries about progress as necessary. This hierarchical approach provides a comprehensive and centralised understanding of project ownership and progress tracking on larger epic requirements that may entail months of effort. 

Alignment on project level

Every project showcased in Qanban includes a description detailing the project’s purpose and the individual leading it, thereby enhancing visibility regarding roles, responsibilities, and initiative ownership. In larger organisational structures, obtaining this information promptly is invaluable for addressing urgent inquiries related to a specific initiative.

Upon accessing each project, Qanban provides a comprehensive overview of all teams involved, along with the leader of each team, ensuring everyone has access to accurate and centralised information. Understanding which individuals lead specific initiatives enables you to communicate clear directives and articulate organisational goals, along with the consequences of not adhering to the established direction. 

To maintain transparency and alignment with the project scope, Qanban offers a project structure feature that showcases all necessary work items for project completion. Additionally, within each project, the “Project Deliverables” provides a summary of the required larger epics and features requirement to be delivered while the “Project Work Items” feature enables Product Owners or Business Analysts to create smaller user requirements and tasks before assigning them to respective teams for execution. This ensures that requirements are not overlooked, and project teams can clearly see and track them.  

Qanban acknowledges that as part of your responsibilities, conducting workshops to gather work estimations is crucial for understanding the size of each requirement and planning accordingly. Each epic, feature, user requirement, and task includes fields for individual business value and estimated effort, which can be captured from the project team. This facilitates determining priority based on perceived business value and estimated effort, thus providing guidance on the sequence of work.

Qanban understands that each project may require a customised process to accommodate its evolving requirements. It supports the breakdown of statuses into stages such as Analysis, Work Breakdown, Workshop, Development, and more, allowing for greater flexibility and more granular process management in the project.

Regularly monitoring progress at a detailed level is essential to ensure that the project team is on track. Qanban offers progress reports accessible at both the project and team levels so that both project manager and team leads can align. These reports provide valuable insights into work item completion patterns and the likelihood of meeting deadlines. Additionally, they highlight when new requirements are introduced during the project, allowing you to assess risk and their impact on the timeline. 

Alignment on team level

Gaining insights into each team’s contributions to the project is effortless with Qanban. Simply clicking on the team within the project leads you to their Kanban board, providing complete transparency into their current tasks. This feature enables you to consistently monitor whether they are following project plan and aligned with project objectives.

Qanban requires every team assigned to a project to adhere to the project methodology, whether it’s Scrum or Kanban. Scrum involves teams planning and grouping their work for a specified timeframe (typically every two weeks), making it more suitable for product development, whereas Kanban follows a free-flow approach, which is better suited for business support tasks.

Qanban acknowledges that each team may demand tailored processes based on its maturity level. It facilitates the breakdown of statuses into stages like Analysis, Ready For Development, In Development, In QA, etc., providing enhanced flexibility and more process granularity in the team. You can view these processes for each team assigned to the project, enabling them to identify discrepancies in processes across teams and assess adherence to essential procedures. Armed with this insight, you have the choice to either enforce a standardised process for all teams or permit teams to determine their own, as long as all critical processes are adhered to.

While teams have the autonomy to create stories and tasks independently, Qanban mandates linking these items to specific project epics or features. This guarantees that all efforts are directed towards the correct epics and features, minimising wasted efforts. Additionally, it enables you to comprehend dependencies and understand all tasks necessary for each epic and feature.

Alignment on stakeholder level

Occasionally, you may need swift visibility into individual team members’ tasks, especially if they encounter recurring deadline issues. The User Workload feature, accessible within each team, provides an overview of individuals’ current tasks and upcoming assignments providing managers a comprehensive understanding of stakeholder capacity and productivity, promoting transparency and awareness. 

What’s Next?

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