Remote work created a need for tools that allow teams of people to work efficiently on complex projects, despite the distance and the lack of check-in meetings.

People involved in the same job should share the same vision and ethics. That’s certainly at the basis of a good project management. Moreover, for complex jobs it is essential you can rely on solid technologies to prevent an unfortunate oversight from turning into a chain reaction of problems and delays.

Over the years, Editha has been trying many ways to share projects through various offline and online tools, commercial and custom solutions. We decided to provide in this post some guidelines for good project management, based on what works for us.

Let’s talk about project management

Let’s start from the basics: what do we mean when we talk about project management? According to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, ‘project management is the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities to meet the project requirements’. Clearly this a very broad definition and it could apply both to large-scale situations, such as the construction of pyramids – as suggest by Italian Wikipedia – and to small-scale contexts, such as housekeeping. They can be both be considered as examples of project management.

Strictly speaking, in the sector of DTP and technical writing, project management can refer to actual projects. Each job, order, manual is a project that needs to be monitored and completed.

Successful projects are those delivered

• on schedule;
• within budget;
• using available resources efficiently;
• meeting the expected quality;
• meeting client satisfaction.

How do we manage jobs in Editha

In order to make work as efficient as possible it is necessary to organize all project steps, from quotation to delivery, to streamline the project workflow. We regularly use client and project-specific checklists and procedures, which have been developed over time, to make sure all relevant information and material are immediately available. Those checklists deal with a very wide range of elements: they can be files such as fonts, images, links, but also information, such as preferences, data, login data and video tutorials.

Some time ago we mentioned in this article how a work-sharing platform can effectively support us when it comes to coordinating a team remotely.

Successful project management requires a comprehensive overview on ongoing projects and on those which are due soon, and a clear picture of statuses, deadlines and assignments. We therefore chose a platform which is intuitive and user-friendly but which can also be easily adapted to the complexity of our projects. In fact, we often have to deal with projects with tight deadlines, in which collaborators have to work on the same task at the same time.

The platform we have chosen as project management tool is Monday. We had set it up well before the start of the pandemic and the beginning of the new era of remote work and it allowed us to keep on working on our projects without any disruption.

The more basic functions of this platform, e.g. creation and assignment of project tasks, setting of deadlines, etc., have been combined with different ones which better suits our needs and philosophy.

We created topic-based areas which are accessible to the entire team, in order to keep our internal documentation used to share and enhance our processes well organised.

Thus, together with the client-dedicated areas for project deliverables, we built a very comprehensive knowledge base, which includes written notes, documents, guides and video tutorials.

We moved to Monday part of our shared agendas, our well-known checklists, our best practices and we created also some virtual meeting and recreational spaces, which make up for the lack of water cooler chats for co-worker who works remotely.

Through the tools that we use daily, we are able to promptly manage all project steps and the whole team is immediately aware of the status of each task and can take action when necessary.

In our years of experience, we established all the procedures that allow us to deliver our projects on time, meeting client satisfaction. We strongly believe in our project management process and we got its quality certified. We can guarantee the same quality to you! Contact us and let’s talk about your next project.

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