With seven powerful features of Zoho Projects 7
The ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in the immediate shift to remote work for many companies. Teams, workplaces, and entire organizations have been forced to adopt remote work to adhere to social distancing. This set into motion a conversation on the workplaces of the future and working from home beyond the current crisis.
Naturally, critics have been apprehensive of the remote work model. It is quite common for highly interdependent and cross-functional teams to be skeptical about effectively working in such a disconnected setting. The reason is simple: connecting employees, managers, and stakeholders across geographies and adhering to ever-changing requirements can be -at least- challenging.
Project management for remote teams
Essentially, project management helps project and process teams to plan, schedule, and execute work, allowing them to meet their objectives and deadlines. While working remotely is one thing, managing a distributed team is an entirely different ballgame. It requires managers to double down on the fundamentals of good management including establishing clear goals, running productive meetings, communicating clearly, and leveraging team members’ individual and collective strengths.
Though this might appear daunting for large scale projects, even when managed at an on-site level, the challenges to manage a project are pretty much the same for remote teams as they are for in-office teams. Here are a few things you can look out for, in order to ensure your project management strategy gets off on the right foot:
- Set clear schedules and deadlines.
- Track employee performance based on OKRs and KPIs.
- Define clear roles and tasks.
- Document and share work items.
- Facilitate clear communication to bolster accountability.
This list might appear far too open-ended to act upon, and this is exactly where a turnkey project management tool can make a world of difference to project managers. Zoho’s cloud-based project management platform, Zoho Projects, helps alleviate common pain points and ramps up productivity and collaboration, especially while working with remote teams.
Introducing Zoho Projects 7
First launched in 2006, Zoho Projects has evolved from a simple online project management tool to a comprehensive solution. The latest version, Zoho Projects 7, has been redesigned to encourage a consistent user experience, with easy navigation and features to help you overcome the chaos in your project management process. Check how:
Looks that matter
The newest version comes with a colorful, refreshing UI that supports multiple themes, including an eye-catching dark mode. In addition to refreshed aesthetics, the new single-page layout ensures single-click navigation to all the modules. This considerably declutters your experience and ensures easy adoption for any business, big or small.
Tracking transitions
If you are tired to dealing with constant delays and trying to figure out where the lag is, you will get excited with the new Status Timeline. The pipeline view of how long a task takes to progress through its various stages, will help you identify bottlenecks with ease and take corrective measures to bring your project back on track.
Perfect work-life balance
The Resource Utilization chart’s UI uniforms for all the date ranges, be it a day, week, or month. Switching between these views is also easy now. The horizontal bars indicate how over or under allocated you are by showing red or green colors for each unit of the selected date range. A Calendar option is also included so that you can select custom date ranges to view these reports. Furthermore, there is a new Heatmap view for easily visualizing disconnected schedules. It’s also equipped with Advanced Filters in all modules and improved Search option that supports a full-text search for the entire product.
A quick pulse of all your work
Global Home now supports two types of dashboards: Personal and Portfolio. The Personal dashboard has widgets that tell you all about your work items from upcoming to overdue issues, tasks, milestones, and events. The Portfolio dashboard, on the other hand, is a compact overview of all the work that’s been happening across projects. This dashboard has widgets that address the project level timeline, status, ownership, budget health, and clients.
Socially distant collaborations
Powerful collaboration features are a mandatory inclusion for any work management tool. Zoho Projects 7 takes it up a notch with its new Discuss module. This module displays all your chatrooms, and also has a Meeting tab for scheduling and viewing your meetings. This is included by integrating with Zoho Cliq and Zoho Meeting. You can also integrate with Zoho People to “Check-In” and “Check-Out” right from within your Projects portal!
Smooth integrations
Collaborating with various teams is also done through information sharing. The current documents module in Zoho Projects is vastly enhanced in the latest version. By integrating with Zoho WorkDrive, users can create and organize team folders. The ability to view relevant information is also achieved by assigning various access privileges.
The much-awaited Gantt chart
This feature will also be available shortly in the mobile app! From custom views in Kanban to keyboard shortcuts, there are several other updates big and small. Rather than listing them all out here, why don’t you try it yourself and let us know what you think?
The best project management software
Zoho Projects incorporates a wide range of built-in tools, facilitating social project management between teams. These features will truly simplify your work and help you succeed in all your projects. So, can a remotely working team be both productive and efficient? With Zoho Projects, they can! That is the reason why it’s considered as the best project management app! If you have not used Projects before, you can start by signing up for a free trial. Here’s to many happy projects!