In today’s technological era, digital technology is growing and shifting rapidly from a carter of peripheral efficiency to fundamentally innovated expertise. Precisely, digital transformation is an immense opportunity for creating value for both society and the industry itself. It can be defined as the amalgamation of digital technology keen on every extent of an industry, resultant in necessary changes to how businesses operate, manage, and exactly how they carry value to the customers. Digitalization in project management requires special inspection and resurrection, and it should be implemented in most of the areas inside an organization. It starts from its supply chain and flow of work to its worker’s skillsets and an organizational chart to its consumer’s communications and its value towards its stakeholders. Notably, digitalization has become even more crucial in the post-Covid-19 era as the pandemic has disrupted traditional business processes. As a result, more and more non-IT companies are belligerently digitizing their traditional process and streamlining their products and services.

Digital Transformation

Many companies have till now immensely benefited from digitalization. Digital transformation is an amalgamation of the customary process of businesses improved with developed advancing technologies, functioning together to drive business ahead and discourse inadequacies in the present industrial sector. Furthermore, digitalization turned around Best Buy’s fortunes and transformed it into a digital leader in technology from just an online platform. There are no areas where digitalization has not transformed an organization. Be it communication, marketing, business development, or product development, it plays a crucial role in a company’s growth. Specifically, project management is one of the critical area, which has changed a lot through digitalization. Also, modern digital tools have taken the project management process to a new level. Moreover, here are few key things that digitalization has done to project management.

Making the Collaboration Easier

The introduction of digitalization and different management tools have made the collaboration of management with the employees and team members easier. The main thing that should be kept in mind is the appropriate use of the tool through which project managers can assign the task, add comments, set alarms for deadlines, and organize the dashboard. Such collaboration leads to better result and helps initiate a cooperative and synergistic environment. Through the project management tools, the teams get better access to content, and managers can monitor the work in a better way. Furthermore, managers can easily assign work to the relevant employees and include detailed information about what needs to be done in the task itself.

Made Process more Result-Oriented

Digital Transformation has made traditional project management tasks like scheduling more automated. Besides, it has considerably reduced project managers’ time and efforts. This means that managers can now turn their focus to their core objectives, strategy optimization, and project delivery. Furthermore, project managers can now align each project with the organization’s strategies and goals. This allows them to deliver more successful outcomes.

Made Team Communication more Efficient

An imperative area where modern digital tools are redefining project management is communication. Precisely, with physical meetings and grouping becoming near-impossible in view of the Covid-19 pandemic, real-time virtual communication has become essential. Until now, emails were considered as a major tool for communication. However, emails proved inadequate when it came to collaboration as they are not designed for real-time discussion. Furthermore, messages may be left unread or unattended, particularly if multiple emails hit the inbox and if the network has not integrated with the email alert system. This often leads to miscommunication and misunderstandings. Therefore, the introduction of collaboration tools such as Chanty and Slacks have enhanced the process of communication. Such tools allow team members and employees across different departments to involve, connect, and interact in real-time. They also make file and document sharing faster and easier.

Helps in Making Data-Driven Decisions

Through digitalization, project managers can easily track and quantify whatever their team members do and make better analytics report. It helps in keeping the projects on track and analyse the budget, cost, and labour effectively. Through digitalization, data sets can also be easily broken down for stakeholders and executives, which provides managers with a better insight about the impact of the decisions as well as business. Furthermore, it allows them to plan future initiatives and make critical strategic decisions. This ultimately enhances project outcomes, and success rate and modern technologies such as Artificial Intelligence can help project managers use this data more creatively.

Enhance Remote Communication

As the lockdown due to COVID-19 still exists, organizations have asked employees to work from home. This has considerably affected the way people communicate with each other. Precisely, the beginning of new-age, real-time communications tools has changed things for the better and colleagues can now connect and collaborate from around the world. However, according to the viewpoint of project managers, the lockdown has brought several challenges, including how to manage teams across large distances, allocate resources accordingly, communicate with remote workers, and monitor the progress. Nevertheless, the resource management tool has helped project managers to address these challenges to a great extent. Such tools can provide full visualization over resources spread over large distances in real time and give better control of the team. Project managers can also communicate changes in the project schedules and processes to their team members instantly. Cloud-based video-conferencing solutions are the other tools that have made a project manager’s life easier in the post-Covid-19 era. Many of them have user-friendly features, accommodating many people at a time and allowing the scheduling of meetings.

In a nutshell, digital transformation is more than just an exhortation. It is one of the trends that is meaningfully changing business right now. Project management is also a part of this trend.

Source – Small Biz Trends