How to Encourage Productivity with Better Roadmaps and Planning

John Krautzel
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For managers, team productivity is a crucial concern. If your team members are having difficulty meeting their goals, roadmaps and better planning can help you increase productivity.

When it comes to accomplishing work goals, planning is crucial. Unfortunately, many management professionals find it easy to let plans slide as a project progresses. The original milestones fall to the wayside, deadlines get pushed back, and clients find it difficult to pin down progress.

One of the most effective ways to increase productivity is to create a specific roadmap for each project. A great deal of work goes into a roadmap, so your team will need to invest time up front for project planning. To start, you should develop a clear understanding of the project. Read through the project brief, identify the client's needs, and investigate the challenges that you may face. You should also examine the budget, the timeline, and any limitations of your team. This comprehensive investigation of a project can help team members spot and plan for potential complications down the road.

Many managers stop here, assuming that the goals in the project brief will provide enough direction. To increase productivity, spend time focusing on the end goals. Define the specific results your employees must produce. Look for performance targets, such as increased profits or increased customer engagement, and turn them into deliverables. Discuss each goal in detail with the team so that everyone is on the same page. According to the Harvard Business Review, you can create a sense of urgency that will help increase productivity by communicating to your employees the importance of the project and the opportunity it presents for the company.

With information about the end goals and the project's current state of affairs, you can create a roadmap to increase productivity. Your roadmap should include all the steps necessary to complete each goal. Assign a deadline to each step, and delegate the work to specific team members. Look at the potential challenges you identified, and create specific plans to combat them. By front-loading your project planning in this manner, you can head off problems before they cause delays.

As the project progresses, refer to the roadmap regularly. Check off each step as it is completed, and hold frequent status-update meetings to ask about potential challenges. Throughout the project, the roadmap should serve as a guide and give team members a way to measure progress. It is also a convenient reference document for client updates; with a single glance, any team member should be able to give a detailed progress report.

It takes time to develop roadmaps and planning practices that work for your team, but the end result is worth the effort. By creating an organized, effective system for managing projects, you can increase productivity and improve team motivation.

 

 

 

(Photo courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net)

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