The current COVID-19 crisis is unfortunate and nobody could have predicted its adverse impact on the entire world. This crisis cannot be merely resolved by referring to any pre-written risk-management policies. To deal with this pandemic organization need to adopt real-time strategies and improvisations. So let’s see some of the effective measures we can take during this pandemic to manage projects effectively
Analyze finances and expenses
With this sudden state of a global pandemic, the foremost step with regards to project management is to analyze the cash back up we have to run the on-going projects. This will help the project managers to visualize if they can survive through this crisis or not. The important financial questions to be answered are:
• For how many months will this cash reserve help them to survive?
• Are there any pending client payments to be made?
• Are there any high fixed costs pending like paying rents?
• Are there any variable costs that could be avoided?
Embracing remote work
Companies who already follow remote work culture can continue working without any pause. But there are organizations for whom this global outbreak has been nothing less than a nightmare. Moving to a completely remote working phase is not an overnight process even for small organizations. Then it’s needless to mention what ordeal it might cause to bigger organizations who were are completely unprepared. But there are a few initial things they can follow in to get things started:
• Investing in good remote tools to carry on seamless work and communication, these can be good laptops, video conferencing tools like zoom, Microsoft teams, skype for business, etc.
• Good project management and time tools like Google Calendar, JIRA, Trello, Wrike, Basecamp, etc
• Remote file-sharing tools so that the files can be accessed by all one time like google drive, dropbox, one drive, etc.
• The right remote working tools, especially for seamless communication and video
Centralize and monitor project data
The project team should maintain all the project data in one centralized location than in different excel sheets. This saves the manager from the trouble to search individual project folder and go through a large trail of emails to find the data he needs.
Revise client expectations
The project manager must be very transparent to the clients about any issues they are facing. They should communicate with the client about these issues will be resolved, so that it doesn’t keep the clients in dark and also gives them ample time to respond.
Supporting employees
Employees are the backbone of any successful project. During this global pandemic outbreak, they too are stressed out and worried about their job security, health, and their future. Protecting them all this crisis and making their lives easier should be the number one priority for any organization.
So to conclude this COVID-19 is not an ordinary situation and will test the management skills even of the best performing workforce. The best thing is to accept the current state and flexibly adapt the changed work practices to smoothly sail through this crisis.