When planning a project, mapping the execution essentials, determining steps to take in case of a hiccup or larger bumps in the road, war rooms are a big help. The idea of a war room is to physically gather an entire project team into a single hub to facilitate brainstorming and response times.
Resembling the military command centers, the project war room is a central meeting place where leaders and members can effectively discuss and strategize how to tackle a campaign – complete with visual aids, such as charts, graphs, pictures and even videos.
But with today’s geographically dispersed and increasingly mobile teams, getting everyone in the same room to discuss a project can be a formidable task to accomplish.
On that note, virtual war rooms equipped with just the right amount of essential project management functionalities are a great alternative to encourage people to actually participate.
Below are three of those functionalities:
#1. Project planning and development
As the meetings begin, leaders first enumerate the specific goals the project is aiming for, which ones must take precedence over all the others, who needs to accomplish what, and when. Deciding the hierarchy, the who’s who and whens of goal achievement can be a headache, more so in physical war rooms when you have to assign everything manually.
Can you imagine all the writing and erasing, and the rewriting you have to do on a whiteboard? Or if you’re doing it via tacking or pasting post-its, it can be much more time-consuming.
Aside from real-time updates, your project management tool, therefore, must allow for on-the-go development, and more tasks and details can be added and modified as the project goes along.
#2. Resource allocation
The seamless completion of a project also depends on the efficient allocation of resources. For this to work, factors such as personnel availability, workload, skills and core competencies have to be taken into consideration. If you’re dealing with a sizable talent pool and you’re still doing things manually, things can get very tricky.
The right project management software is equipped with a resource allocation feature that automatically detects conflicts, such as when a member or sub-team is handling too much work while another is handling less, and alerts the manager so adjustments can be made accordingly. For bigger projects, managers can assign team leaders as bigger tasks are cut up into smaller pieces.
#3. Task delegation and scheduling
Task delegation and scheduling can be simplified via a project management solution that’s capable of automatically generating plans and charts, however complex the task leveling structure may be by simply defining tasks and priorities, and you can already visually create a plan, resulting in a clear and more streamlined project structure.
Conclusion
It’s a blow to productivity if you’re still jotting down names or tacking on notes to a board while ideas are being sucked by the unforgiving thought flow quicksand. A faster virtual war room allows you to better keep up. Choose a software that’s equipped with the features to deal with common project management issues effectively, and you get a trustworthy platform for holding virtual war room sessions.
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