How to successfully manage projects remotely

Let's start by stating the obvious: working remotely is not for everyone. Having said that, you don’t need to win "world's best organized human being" contest, in order to pull it off.

Here are 3 key points to be successful as a remote project manager or consultant:

COMMUNICATION SKILLS AND CO-MANAGING TOOLS

You must have an excellent communication skill in order to run projects successfully. The main challenge a project manager experience, is to “make things happen” according to time frame, budges and planned content.

Working remotely makes this challenge even more difficult.

There are several managing tools that will help you keep in touch and monitor the progress of projects you run, without frustrating everyone around you:

· Schedule weekly meetings with relevant teams and make sure those meetings are steady. Changing the time frame of the weekly meeting might cause confusion of in availability of some key participants.

· Use messaging apps to communicate privately with people (e.g. Zoom, WhatsApp, Slack…)

· For all meetings, use video option. That way you can share screens and make sure all participants are aligned and tuned.

· Summarizing each meeting and sending it to all by email will make tracking and issues highlighting much easier.

FLEXIBILITY

Make yourself available.

When working from home during these times, we are all maneuvering between home and work activities. It is important to make yourself available during the day to address the project customers and stakeholders.

MORE MEETINGS

· Since you won’t be working face to face, conduct more meetings, preferably, video meetings.

· Set one-on-one meeting with the project’s key people (replacing coffee breaks you probably did at the office)

· Conduct monthly or quarterly project review meetings on longer engagements to increase the "virtual" touch points on the project.

· Set weekly status updates meetings.

· More frequent team meetings will strengthen team cohesion and collaboration and help eliminate any frustrations that could otherwise come with team members not having close access to the project leader.

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Our team consults project managers and startups that are willing to recruit one, help them establish and modify role requirements, values and responsibilities.

Among our services:

· Provide you with guidelines for working remotely

· Guidance for projects plans including planning, prioritization, milestones, and deliveries

· Time management consulting

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SHELLEY DVORSKI

PROJECT MANAGEMENT EXPERT

Shelley has led cross-organizational Saas development projects and product release cycles for over 17 years, at tech startups and large global corporations, such as Dell-EMC, VMware and Cellebrite. She attained her B.Sc. in Computer Engineering from Tel Aviv University, specializing in databases and programming.