Gain Managerial Alignment in Your Organization without Gantt Charts: 4 Tips

Gain Managerial Alignment in Your Organization without Gantt Charts: 4 Tips
Managerial Alignment

Managing multiple projects in parallel within a portfolio of projects requires strong managerial alignment. Managerial alignment is when managers are in line with their supervisors and the ones that they supervise. Ideally, they are all focused on getting their goals delivered while staying on the same page with company goals, working in sync from the project portfolio manager to the project manager, to the team leader of task owners.

In order to do so, we present the following steps towards managerial alignment. 

4 Tips in Creating Managerial Alignment

1) Select a project portfolio focused solution

Choose a solution that is focused on project portfolio management and has a collaborative timeline. When stakeholders are using one platform to review a project portfolio, sharing data, and viewing it and contributing to it in accordance with their role, the organization is provided with a way to maintain managerial alignment.

It should provide you and all managers a visual that is easy to understand and allows for project portfolio clarity. That means that the status of all the projects within a project portfolio should be immediately understood from a clear visual perspective. With a clear understanding of what is taking place (and what is not), project portfolio managers can drive more effective decisions at the right time, while working aligned with project managers and the team leaders that they manage. 

2) Define priorities based on an agreed set of business drivers

Defining priorities can be a daunting task because sometimes it is hard to measure the true value of a project. And once you do, the upkeep of keeping the information aligned with the different software programs you are using for the project plans can lead to a lot of wasted time and updating hassles. Hence, it would be ideal to have a prioritization module within the same project planning tool. 

3) Engage the project team to get the data you need

When team members are able to update the status of their contribution to a project, they not only save time in trying to understand the overall project status, but are set up to see how important their work is, get them more involved, and participate more.

4) Enable good communication and easy reporting

When time is limited and you want to be productive and not wasting time on meetings that could have been an email. Better yet, the best communication is when you don’t even need to communicate! When you have shared data presented in a clear visual project portfolio preview, it can speak for itself. And when and if reporting needs to be done, all you have to do is select the relevant data that you want to reveal within a dashboard and just use that. No need to try to put together a comprehensive slide deck to create a data report every time. 

In addition, great leadership is a skill that needs to be developed so that managerial alignment can be better executed. In fact, Simon Sinek talks about “Why the Middle Man is the Hardest Job” in this YouTube video. So in addition to getting a software tool that helps you drive these 4 tips home, providing your leaders with the culture of leadership discipline will also be beneficial to gain managerial alignment.

What Software Helps You Gain Managerial Alignment?

Are Gantt charts helpful for managerial alignment?

Today, modern Gantt charts are still being used for project management combined with other multiple tools. And yet, although Gantt charts are an affordable solution when you’re one project manager and you need to plan a project, they do not provide you with the ability to gain managerial alignment (i.e., any of the 4 tips mentioned above) when you have multiple project managers with multiple dynamic projects. With Gantts, chaos is likely to ensue.

1) Modern Gantt chart solutions lead to siloed data

When using Gantt charts and Gantt-based solutions, they require multiple solutions to work with them. Depending on the needs, they can range from slide decks, spreadsheets, physical or digital whiteboards, physical or digital Kanban boards, and so on. 

This leads to data being spread out and oftentimes, difficult to track and follow. 

In addition, collaboration on a single timeline is non-existent on all types of Gantt-based solutions, so it is likely that different roles that interact with the project manager will use different solutions to see to their deliverables.

Hence, there is no clear understanding of what is taking place and what needs attention between the project manager and whomever they need to coordinate with.

2) Gantt charts and Gantt-based solutions don’t present elaborate projects clearly

When working with multiple projects at a time you can most likely attest that it can become pretty difficult to follow on a Gantt chart waterfall; especially since projects are dynamic, elaborate, and long-lasting. Thus, they tend to contain too much irrelevant information, require a lot of scrolling down a screen to try to understand the big picture of where everything stands and impacts one another. In short, they cannot be used to reflect the relevant data that is needed to make important decisions at the right time. Delays and mistakes are almost inevitable, dampening the ability of project managers to stay aligned with what is going on and where they need to go.

Ultimately, Gantts of any sort can prevent your organization from reaching strategic goals with the best impact due to the lack of managerial alignment from the top, down. 

Accomplishing managerial alignment with Proggio

Where Gantts fail to provide you with the capabilities you need to attain managerial alignment, Proggio enables you to attain all 4 tips mentioned above. This is in part is due to two features that you will not find elsewhere 

1) Proggio is a robust single source of truth (SSoT) with exceptional project portfolio management visibility

As SSoT implies, when you choose to use Proggio, you set your project managers up to stay in harmony with their executive director, who they answer to, and with their team leaders, who answer to them, in one platform. No need for multiple solutions or APIs, or intensive software training for stakeholders. Proggio is easy and intuitive for all users with a well-equipt set of tools and views for everyone. All of the joint data is visible to one another, according to their permissions and roles, so that if a change is made all dependencies and cross-dependencies will automatically be updated if permitted.  

No data is lost and everyone is always on the same page while staying focused on their goals.  

2) Proggio brings clarity to the entire organization

Proggio displays only the relevant data in a clear and visual view from the project portfolio and the project management perspective so that every relevant stakeholder is always in the know about whatever it is that is relevant to them. Hence, less time is wasted in meetings or emails that are going back and forth, trying to decipher what took place in their project portfolio or project–it is reflected in a clear visual project portfolio view and in a ProjectMap™ view.

And if the visible data is not enough because someone does not have access to the information they need, reporting is easy. Instead of spending time with Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint slides, you can quickly select a customized view of data to share as a report

To learn more about how Proggio allows you to accomplish managerially alignment

In conclusion

Achieving managerial alignment can only be gained when you have: project portfolio with clear visibility of a collaborative timeline where everyone has the right tools and views within a single platform (SSoT), enabling real-time data for quick decision-making, prioritization, simple reporting, and easy communication between the project portfolio leader, project manager, and team leaders—just to name a few. When the right solution is selected, then managerial alignment becomes automatic if not seamlessly easy.

Managerial roles need to be able to arrange the information in a very clear way and present it to management to allow them to make the right decisions. We understand that it is quite common that organizations use a combination of spreadsheets, Gantt charts, presentations or even whiteboards to create this managerial alignment. But when they are running complex projects with elaborate intricacies, cross-functional and cross-department dependencies, and a large workforce, the capabilities and visual clarity that these tools offer is limited and inhibit the project managers’ abilities to do their work.

On the other hand, you can choose Proggio, the single source of truth project portfolio solution that enables managerial alignment and more with the ultimate degree of project portfolio visibility.

Want to see how Proggio can help you gain managerial alignment with your use case? 

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