Best Project Management Tips Ever!

Do you prioritize tasks and projects in your head? Have you tried to block out appointments, but emergencies always throw everything awry?

Discover some quick power tips for greater effectiveness managing people, projects …and time. It’s not about working harder, it’s about working smarter.

The key: Try managing projects instead of time. That way, you won’t need to check your watch every few hours or grow frazzled trying to jam too much into your day.
Here’s some of the best project management tips to help maximize office and team performance:

1. Give snappy introductions. When you’re asked to introduce a guest speaker to a group, distribute the person’s full written bio in advance. That way, you can limit your intro to two or three sentences and direct the audience to the handout for more on the speaker’s background.

2. Cluster related jobs. Maximize every trip from your office by arranging groups of meetings, inspections and errands near your destination. Even if you’re just taking the elevator up three flights to see a colleague, deliver documents needed by others nearby.

Also, combine similar activities. If you’re visiting field offices to generate buy-in for your pet project, line up back-to-back meetings where you can sell the troops without distractions. If you schedule unrelated tasks smack in the midst of your “road show,” you force yourself to shift gears abruptly.

3. Match task with person. Break a project into its component parts—the specific jobs that you can delegate. Then assign these tasks to the appropriate people with deadlines (day and time) for them to complete each stage.

Explain what you want done in writing, and include a numbered list of to-do steps to increase clarity. Distribute a master list of everyone’s role to the whole unit so workers can share information easily.

4. Make “just-in-time” decisions. Smart managers choose the proper moment to gather and review the data they need to draw the right conclusion. If you rush to make a preliminary decision— only to revisit the issue repeatedly in the weeks ahead—you waste time.

As a rule, only make decisions once. If circumstances change or new information surfaces, then reassess. But otherwise, don’t dally or rely on committees to hash out something that you can resolve faster on your own.

For more information and to download the free report, ‘10 Time Management Tips: A how-to guide on efficiently managing your time through effective delegating, calendar management and using productivity tools’ visit, http://www.businessmanagementdaily.com/6630/time-management-without-a-clock?src=SONAR-RCLP-OM-TimeManagement.