Team Management and the Art of Task Delegation
The better managers in this world know how to get the best from their teams. They are able to analyze their team’s strengths and weaknesses, and delegate tasks to team members who have the capabilities to carry them out. The point here is not only do successful managers know the strength and weaknesses of their team members, they also know how to delegate and prioritize tasks. The fusion of team skills and good task management is instrumental in completing a project to deadline.
Prioritizing Tasks
All projects breakdown into a series of tasks. Using a system of prioritization, completing the tasks in the right order is a significant and necessary step to completing your project. Consider:
- What tasks underpin your project?
- Which tasks need to be completed to ensure good workflow?
- Which tasks are integral and interlaced with other tasks that need to be done?
Depending on your project and your team, you should be able to list all of the tasks, or almost all of them that need to be performed for the project to be a success. At this point you will be able to see the tasks that need completing first, based on what we have outlined above. Task delegation now becomes a simpler process. Your team can work on the essential, important, and urgent aspects of the project. You can pass responsibility for tasks to specific team members, based on capabilities.
Team Communication
If your team works in an office environment, the chances are you hold a meetings and briefings in the office. As the project progresses, email, phone calls, and face-to-face meetings are used to pass on project progress and updates. This is fine for some matters, but all of these standard communication mediums fail as they do not show the progress of the project. What one team member is doing is invisible to another, and sometimes even to you the team manager.
This issue becomes a bigger problem if your team works remotely. Now the face to face element disappears.
Keeping Track of Delegated Tasks
Without a good communication medium, team management becomes more difficult and runs the risk of breaking down. How you can confirm the work has been carried out? How can your teams prove what tasks are completed, and indeed show other team members project progress? Do you have regular meetings, email updates, scheduled phone calls?
The issue with these mediums is the project stops as all update each other on where you are. This is one of the reasons we developed Priority Matrix, to address task delegation and tracking, and to facilitate better communication between you and your teams. We wanted to make team management easier to accomplish. So how does it work?
How Does Priority Matrix help with my Team Management Challenges?
Priority Matrix gives you the complete picture on what is happening with your project, and facilitates two way communications between you and your teams in real time, even if your teams work in the field.
Utilizing the Eisenhower four quadrant system, Priority Matrix allows you to group tasks by urgency and importance. From this point you can assign tasks to specific teams and team members. They are now considered the owner of the task, and as it is completed they can pass it from one quadrant to another to show project progress.
Communication is facilitated via the team’s cell phones and other devices in real time. Priority Matrix is cloud based and as such you can feed your team tasks and check progress regardless of whether the team has an IOS, Android, or Windows device. As well as showing task delegation, your teams can show which tasks are complete in real time. This gives your employees proof they have accomplished tasks set.
As you can see what your team has completed, you can now plan the next phase. Your team will also receive satisfaction from crossing off tasks from the ‘to do’ list.
If you want to make your team task management easier and to improve your organizational skills, take the free trial of Priority Matrix. The app makes task delegation easier to visualize, and it greatly improves communication as it cuts endless meetings and the need to send emails out of the loop. It makes tracking project progress more accurate and instant. You could be in a different State to your teams, and have the big picture on project progress.
Make your team management and task delegation better today with Priority Matrix. Try it for free.