Benefits of Project Boards and Why You Need One Now
Ordinary, a project manager spends a considerable amount of time on planning. Project boards can help to reduce the time spent, visualize the process and prioritize tasks. Haven’t tried a project board yet? Well, it’s high time to.
What does a project board do?
First of all, it is a multi-purpose space where you can track assignments across several projects and detect weak points. A project board is a tool that depicts the workflow visually and as a result, maximizes efficiency. Being a collaborative tool, a project board stimulates to discuss and analyze tasks. Consequently, it leads to improvements and strategy development.
Certainly, there are enough project board types to choose from. Therefore, organisations may pick a specific methodology to stick to.
- Scrum boards – typically they depict a process in sprints.
- Kanban boards – born in Japan, the term means a visual card with the focus to track the work in progress.
- Visual Management/Task boards – provide a visual to support keeping track of the work. Tasks are presented as cards, just like a Kanban board. A basic layout can be To Do, Doing and Done.
Setting a project board up
Using a Kanban board as an example it is obvious that a project board setup doesn’t need much effort. Kanban project boards primarily consist of lists and cards. Often lists represent project stages. For instance, the software development process might be split into Backlog, In work, Testing, Quality Assurance, Done.
Benefits of project boards
In fact, there are lots of arguments in favour of using a project board. Here are only a few of them:
- Tasks visualization – all team members may track what they should fulfil and see the state of the overall work.
- Comprehensive task description – the board displays not only the assignment but the level of its priority, how it is dependent on the other ones, when exactly it should be done, to which department it belongs and more.
- Process automation – if you decide to build a project board in dedicated software you will rid yourself of a lot of manual work as the software will create recurring tasks for you, save successful layouts as templates and relocate tasks depending on their statuses.
- Efficient task distribution – obviously, with a project board it is much easier to allocate tasks in accordance with an employee role and workload.
- Helps to detect issues – probably, a project board will show you the issues you have no idea your project has.
- Reports and strategy building – Being used as a reporting tool, a project board is an excellent way to communicate information to the stakeholders and decision-makers.
Why do you need a project board now?
With the help of a board, you may have an enhanced project management experience and open up new opportunities for your team. It presents an activity feed of what happens and when. Moreover, team members observe work in progress, while managers keep everything under control. By implementing, a project board you have more chances to drive a project to success.
Try out Kanbanchi, a dedicated project board software to stay focused and perform effectively.