It is very often to see that several balls have to be kept in the air at the same time during projects. Analog and digital solutions help to keep the overview; Post-its, notes in calendar, to-do or OPos lists are maintained either on paper or digitally while the latter mostly in Excel. But, as a leading German digital magazine stated: software solution often fits better.
Excel’s limits
Excel is often the tool of choice when projects need to be structured and managed. This is also the case for an asset management client, for whom we have been regularly updating sales-supporting documents for several years.
Every month, more than a hundred documents – presentations, brochures, two-pages – are recorded in a list and revised in a recurring process. Apart from the standard “to-do”, “in progress” and “released”, they pass through the process chain in further individual steps.
As long as the tasks were processed by a single person, Excel was a helpful program for keeping track of the current tasks. But when the complexity of the project increased in two dimensions – scope and project participants – then Excel comes to its limits.
Better overview with agile project management
As both the order volume (in terms of the number of documents) and the team size grew, project management and administration also became more demanding. So we needed a more revolutionary than evolutionary solution. To keep the team up to the challenges of daily business, we introduced Kanban, an agile project management solution.
For us important elements from Kanban:
– The visualization of the current status of different work steps with the help of Kanban board, so that a better project overview is guaranteed.
– The possibility of storing additional information to individual tasks for all accessible.
– The possibility of the independent organization of each individual team member.
– The possibility of illustrating complex workflows.
Before we established this digital solution, we used a whiteboard as a practice test in the team for two months. This was the prototype for our digital Kanban board. Today we use it to map our workflow. This put the individual team members in a position to keep a better overview of the current status in the mass of tasks.
In addition, the digital solution provides us with transparency about the project, so that we can provide the customer with information about the status of individual documents at any time without being involved ourselves. Important decisions and information are also documented in day-to-day business.
We continue to use Excel for reporting to our customers. Therefore, our choice fell on a solution that offers the appropriate interfaces and export functions in the appropriate format: taiga.io.
We continue to use Excel for reporting to our customers. We therefore chose a solution that offered the corresponding interfaces and export functions in the appropriate format: taiga.io.
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