Inefficient Collaboration Tools Hindering Project Management Teams

With project management emerging as a common role for professionals these days, better strategies and tech tools are required to enable teams to collaborate more effectively, according to a recent survey from Planview. The resulting report, titled “Everyone Is a Project Manager,” reveals that collaboration inefficiencies are literally costing employees nine weeks a year in terms of wasted work time. To help reduce this, survey respondents said they’d like to see IT tools that enhance planning, with dashboards that can track multiple projects at once. A total of 650 global professionals who manage and/or work on projects took part in the research. The following slide show presents highlights from the survey, with charts provided courtesy of Planview.

Two of three respondents are not project-certified, yet manage projects as part of their role. More than seven of 10 projects are governed by a project management office (PMO).

Four of five respondents need to take part in “cross functional collaboration” to do their jobs. Three of five work on projects with geographically dispersed collaboration participants, and 63% collaborate with external team members as part of their role.

It may sound old-fashioned, but email is still the No. 1 collaboration tool, as cited by 93% of respondents. Other top tools include audio conferencing (as cited by 75% of respondents), web conferencing (73%) and spreadsheets (70%).

Time-tracking tools, data and approaches have emerged as critical for teams, as 42% of respondents said they use these to make project resource decisions. Other time-tracking drivers include the need to stay on top of costs (as cited by 38% of respondents), assess how time is spent (30%) and monitor capitalization (21%).

In the U.S., respondents estimate that they waste, on average, 7 hours a week—or nine weeks a year—due to collaboration inefficiencies. One-third of respondents overall said they also struggle with duplicating efforts and declining team morale.

The wealth of emails—including the risk of missing important ones—presents the biggest collaboration hurdle, as cited by 52% of respondents. Ineffective communications between team members ranked second, as cited by 48%.

The lack of effective, available project management tools also ranked high as a collaboration hurdle, as cited by 37% of respondents. About one-third also cited the need to spend too much time reporting on project status and ineffective communications with external project contributors.

Nearly seven of 10 respondents said their collaboration tools need project planning features. About two-thirds said they want to see dashboards that track multiple projects in these tools.

Three of five respondents in IT use collaborative platforms. But only 47% of all other respondents do so.

More than one-third of respondents in IT take advantage of lean and agile tools. But just 15% of all other respondents use these tools.