How to utilise Google calendar as a project management tool

To enjoy success as a modern digital marketing project manager, you and your team must successfully employ a range of tools. Google Calendar is one such tool which is highly effective in project management.

As a project manager in the media industry, you know that the best pieces of project management software need to tick off a range of boxes. The follow list looks at these:

1. Project Planning

In today’s digital age, you require a tool which can assist you with  harmonising a remote as well as multidisciplinary team. In other words, in order to make sure that the project remains on track, it is necessary for you to maintain a transparent project overview, assign tasks in addition to keeping everyone up to date.

This device needs to operate in a manner that everyone can comprehend at a glance. In order to guarantee an effective as well as logical workflow that gets rid of missed steps, each team member needs to receive the correct tasks at the right instances. Remember that one forgotten task can result in the whole project stalling.

2. Document management

Version control which is accurate, in addition to document management, is vital in the digital age. When your project files are opened by various people at different times, all parties need to have the correct permissions and understanding of where they should work.

Poor document management can result in huge headaches. Work may get lost or some team members may work on the incorrect version of a document. This means that you need a tool which keeps everybody on the same page.

3. Team collaboration and communication

Without a tool which offers communication that is effective, your creative team will grow to be a collection of unrelated individuals who find it difficult to work in tandem. This tool can have a substantial impact on the quality of your project, the contentment of your team as well as your ability to adhere to deadlines.

In order to keep conversations on-topic, you need to provide simple, well-organised tools for collaboration as well as communication. Without these tools in place, teams could waste countless hours trawling through old email threads and conversations in order to find specific directions or files.

4. Productivity tracking

 As a project manager, you walk a fine line between talented creative as well as rigorous manager. You are responsible for billing which is accurate. If you don’t have the ability to track your team’s time, you will not be able to confidently say if a project is profitable or unprofitable. Without the data to back up the work of your team, you’ll also find that billing becomes nightmarish. And when you are required to provide a detailed analysis to your internal and external stakeholders, you’ll be left empty-handed.

Google Calendar and project management

Google Calendar is terrific for managing appointments. The great news is that this is not all that it can do. The sharing, searchability, timeline view as well as other countless features make Google Calendar a simple yet powerful project management tool.

Here are some ideas on how to utilise this in your project management process.

Create a calendar for each project

To preserve client privacy temporarily change the title of each calendar although the syntax remains the same, in other words ‘year’ (11=2011, 10=2010, etc.) and then the ‘name of the project’. Making use of proper syntax assists you with keeping your calendar in order as well as making them easier to browse or search.

Sharing

Share the calendar with the participants in your team who are involved in the project. It is even possible to share calendars with clients if they communicate the need to monitor the stream of activities as well as project deadlines.

Timeline

By putting the tasks on the calendar you’ll turn each calendar into a detailed project’s timeline. We found the ‘agenda’ view particularly to be valuable as it gives a clear overview of the upcoming deadlines you have set.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

Want to learn more about project management in the media? If you do then you really need to do our Project Management for the Media Course. For more information, please follow this link.