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When project management began, people were physically working together. As time progressed, work management wasn’t under one roof anymore. Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic struck, more people are now working remotely, and many businesses have been forced to offer remote and flexible working solutions to their employees. To attain successful collaboration with remote teams, project managers now rely on digital project management tools bringing the term remote project management. We’ve compiled this post to explain what remote project management entails and how it operates.
What Is Remote Project Management?
Remote project management involves managing a remote project and leading remote or hybrid teams to make sure every team member is collaborative and productive towards the project’s success. A remote project manager is in charge of a remote project team. A remote project team involves a group of professionals working on a unified project remotely from different physical locations. They could be in different cities, time zones, and locations. They can be fully remote, hybrid teams, or flex teams.
A remote project manager is the person in charge of the remote project and the remote team tasked with seeing the project’s success from a remote location. Recent events like COVID-19 and blockchain technology have proved that many industries and companies can survive and thrive using remote teams and remote project management.
Today, web development, content marketing, SEO, computer science, data analytics, training, blockchain and machine learning careers lead in the demand for remote project managers.
How Does Remote Project Management Occur?
Managing remote project teams has unique challenges that weren’t there in traditional project management. These challenges can include communication, task management, collaboration, team building, reporting, and feedback. Companies and project managers rely on digital project management tools to connect remote teams virtually to counter these challenges. Remote project management operates with high flexibility levels to accommodate distant teams who are either in different cities or time zones. This is because following a rigid set of rules might not be viable and can impact the project’s success.
A remote project manager operates with multiple project views, often using real-time data to make hybrid and remote teams feel that they’re working together, despite their distances. Using project management software, project teams can collaborate and engage one another on the platform, with tasks being marked as ongoing, new, finished, and reviewed on the project boards.
How to Manage Remote Project Teams Successfully
1. Find the right remote team
Before you start remote projects or remote team management, you need a team that will be dedicated to remote work. Not everyone can succeed in a remote working environment. A remote worker needs to be highly motivated, honest, and trustworthy. Other people in different locations and time zones will rely on their sub-project to complete the project. To get a group of remote workers together, you need to:
- Understand your project’s remote structure
- Find the right remote candidates for the job with the matching skills and attitude you need
- Hire the candidate, and make the project’s expectations and guidelines clear, from project goals, work hours, time-tracking, authority, frequency of check-ins, etc.
Your remote project will succeed with a great team with the right skills, mindset, and attitude whether you’re in corporate, technology, or healthcare.
2. Invest in Remote Project Management Tools
The only way to have a productive remote project team is if you have a great remote project management tool to support your work. You need a tool that will give your remote team a central space to collaborate, communicate, report and access all work-related data. You should choose a tool that also helps you, the project manager, place project or company announcements, project feedback, and employee appreciation or rewards. The remote project management tool should be able to help you:
- Assign tasks to individual team members or as a group
- Track project milestones
- Streamlining project collaboration and processes
- Create feedback channels
- Simplifying the project team’s communication channels
- Enable project documentation and task management
Examples of project management apps that many project managers use across the globe are Work start, Asana, Slack, Trello, Google WorkSpace, and more.
3. Give Team Members Clear Goals and Expectations
Every team member involved with the project needs to clearly understand the project’s goals and their roles in achieving those goals. This might require you to create a document that explains the plan along with individual responsibilities. Avoid communication, words, or figurative images that can confuse or even offend team members. Your communication should be clear and specific about the project goals, objectives, deadlines, reports, and general expectations.
4. Team Communication and Feedback
Once you hire your project team, you need to keep everyone engaged and trust that they’ll do their job. In remote project management, team engagement is only through digital communication. The team members might be in different locations, but proper communication can keep them engaged and feel connected. This is a great step towards a productive team. Here’s how you can keep your team engaged:
- Get a remote project management tool that encourages communication and collaboration among team members
- Team members can sign-ins during their shifts with greetings or project updates
- Hold virtual meetings either per department or with the whole team
- Keep the team feeling connected with open rewards
Provide company-wide, or departmental communications on the communication channels. Like in traditional teams, remote teams don’t need micromanaging. Give them space to work and trust that they’ll achieve the project goals
5. Offer Clear Feedback
As a project manager, it’s your role to give feedback, positive or negative, to remote teams. Feedback helps make expectations clear and improve productivity and engagement. Recognition and reward programs can help employees stay positive and work towards achieving project goals. If a team member’s performance isn’t what’s expected of them, constructive feedback is better than criticism. However, if the employee can’t achieve the project targets, don’t be afraid to let them go and find someone else with the right skills to sustain the project.
Endnote
Remote teams are the new order in many companies, and remote project management is gaining traction. Get a committed remote team and a great remote project management tool if you want to start a remote project. As a replacement for the ordinary physical office space, a great project management tool will give you a central location for work and team management for the project’s success.
