Our Customer Success Team shares some best tips and ideas for ensuring your 2022 project planning process is successful this year!
With a New Year in full swing, we’re sure your team is looking for some ways to optimize your 2022 project planning. This might meet cleaning up old projects, reprioritizing for this year, or finding new ways to work efficiently as a team.
We wanted to share with you some ideas that we’re hearing from our customers on how they plan to make the post of their Planning Board and process this year!
Before you start your planning for this year, it’s important to have some conversation around what worked well and what could use some improvement as you consider how to continue to use your Planning Board. This conversation is helpful to have as a larger team and could include some questions and topics such as:
- Were we aligned on our definitions of the various project stages?
- Were there any stages we didn’t use?
- Could we optimize how we use tasks?
- Did the Planning Board give us good visibility into our projects?
Based on some of these prompts, you might have some ideas for how to better plan in 2022! We’ll share some ideas next on how you might be able to optimize this process.
Before you start adding your 2022 Projects, we’d recommend taking some time to clean up and tidy your Planning Board. Did you have any projects that were cancelled during the year that are still on your board? You can mark these as “Cancelled” to move them off of your main board by clicking the three dots on the project card, then “Cancel.”
You should also take this step for anything that has been Completed. For any project cards you might have added as a test or example, you could Delete those.
We’d also recommend going through and ensuring that each project has up-to-date start and end dates, has been assigned an owner and is in the correct stage.
We’ve been getting some amazing feedback from customers on how they are using the stages.
We wanted to share some of our favourite stage ideas you might want to include as part of your 2022 project management.
On Our Radar: This stage is being used by customers to document any projects that you might be hearing rumblings or rumours of, but that you haven’t officially been tasked with starting. This is a good way to keep a line of sight into what might kick-off over the next few months.
Backlog: This stage is an easy way to record any projects that you haven’t officially started, but that you plan to address when you have the resources and capacity.
Goals: Some customers have added a 2022 Goals stage. This would give you an easy way to document and improve visibility for any high level goals or initiatives that you want to tackle as a team.
Lastly, one of the most common questions we receive is how can we ensure that our team is updating their projects and utilizing the Board. We’d recommend making your Planning Board central to all team conversations and meetings.
We’ve heard customers have great success with carving out a portion of their team meetings where they pull up the Planning Board and have the team provide updates on their projects.
This is a great way to reinforce that the Planning Board and process is an integral part of your team strategy, and ensure that everyone makes any needed updates to their projects prior to the meeting.
We hope you find these ideas helpful as you kick off and continue your planning this year. We’d also love to hear any ideas you might have taken as a team as you started with your Planning Board in 2022!
