Project Management Best Practices for Remote Teams

Your team is across three time zones, the designer is waiting on you to give her feedback which was buried in Slack, and your client wants to know the status yesterday. What was once a simple handoff process in the office has become a chaotic high-wire act with no net.

Teams have gained unprecedented flexibility in the move to remote work, but with that flexibility has come new challenges of misaligned schedules, tool sprawl, and lack of focus and accountability. Without a well-defined strategy, even the best teams can lose momentum and get buried in chaos.

Fortunately, remote work just means adapting your approach and implementing some project management best practices to hit your goals. With the right strategy and systems in place, remote teams can actually transform from fragmented and reactive to organized, intentional and even more productive than their in-office counterparts.

Ready to get it together? Let’s look at the best practices that will make your remote projects a well-oiled machine.

Leverage Tech to Your Advantage

The right technology and processes can make all the difference when managing a project remotely. With robust project management systems and processes in place, your team can avoid delays caused by communication mishaps like overly large files in emails, or file formatting errors, for instance. Here, implementing a simple comms process to use a PDF converter or a PDF file compressor is all that needs to be done to save on time when sharing documents, contracts, or design files.

Automation tech can also be a great asset to any communications and project management systems. Automating as many redundant tasks as possible (like status updates and deadline reminders) keeps the team focused on doing work that has meaning, rather than agonizing over admin. The point is not to have a digital toolbox with a thousand apps, but to have a lean suite of tools that removes friction points and enables.

Remote teams are fully reliant on technology to collaborate to get the job done, as there is no in-person work involved. This means using video conferencing and messaging platforms to stay in touch and relying on staying connected to achieve the project goals. 

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Use a Project Management App and Other Digital Tools to Achieve Outcomes

When working on different projects with remote teams, using a specific project management application is one crucial way to stay organised and deliver a successful project. A great project management tool will allow you to set clear deadlines, create and assign deliverables to the team, and break down large tasks into achievable subtasks. 

Some different project management applications to consider include Asana, Trello and Monday. Each platform has its unique advantages, such as Trello's elegant Kanban board and card system, Asana's user-friendliness and UX, and Monday's granular, detailed approach. If you can, you might want to test various project management tools before settling on one permanently for your team to use.

In addition to project management software, it's important to use other tools available to you, including file converters and compressors, messaging platforms, video conferencing, and collaborative spreadsheets or task trackers. 

Schedule Regular Meetings with Your Team

Communication is an essential skill for project managers, and holding regular meetings is an excellent way to improve communication within your team if everyone is fully remote.

Meetings needn't eat up large chunks of your time either: in most cases, half an hour to an hour will do for a quick touchpoint. Allow enough time for team members to share their progress and raise any roadblocks they've run into. 

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Meetings are a great opportunity for everyone to collaborate to solve any issues. At the end of every meeting, you should establish next steps so that everyone knows what to do and have detailed minutes as a record of what was discussed and actions highlighted for relevant people. 

Define Role Expectations and Team Structure 

Projects can be completed just as effectively remotely as in person, provided that you clearly establish roles and expectations for the team. While office-based teams have the advantage of built-in ways of working: normally, everyone works at the same time and for the same number of hours, it's a bit different for remote workers. 

When managing remote teams, project managers must work harder to define roles and expectations properly, especially if they have people living and working in different time zones. 

Flexibility and giving people the time they need to work autonomously are essential. However, you also ideally want to carve out some overlap between everyone's working hours to provide space for effective collaboration. 

It's also vital to make sure everyone on the team knows what they have to do. Each member of your team should have a clearly defined role within the project. You can also assign specific tasks to individuals using a tool like Asana or Trello. By making all these things clear from the start, project managers can eliminate the need for guesswork and have everyone working autonomously as long as there are some touchpoints along the way. 

Define Reporting and Communication Methods 

Your remote team members are probably going to want some guidance on what's expected of them in terms of regular communication and reporting, so it's essential to set guidelines. As a project manager, you should decide which communication channels to use for the team, how often meetings should be held and who each team member should report to.

Some questions to answer when defining your communication guidelines include: 

• How will you structure regular check-ins and meetings? 

• How will reporting be done once a task is completed? 

• How will you keep tasks moving along in a timely manner? Will you use a time tracking tool or simply check in with each member to ensure tasks are being completed on time? 

• How will team members communicate with each other? Will this be done via your dedicated project management software, an instant messaging app like Teams or Slack, or through other means?

Clearly defined communication and reporting requirements are crucial to project organisation and success. 

Bringing It All Together

Remote project management is never going to be 100% trouble-free, unfortunately. The spreadsheet isn’t exactly going to grow wings and fly itself to your colleague’s computer in a different time zone, and the odd unforced error due to a crossed wire in communications can snowball into a missed milestone. However, if you use a few tried and tested best practices, you can keep these problems from becoming defining features of your team’s work.

Put simply, best practice in remote project management consists of open, clear communication, realistic and achievable deadlines, and the use of common resources such as a shared dashboard. At its heart, remote project management is all about a management style that doesn’t try to replicate the traditional office environment in a virtual one, but instead creates a transparent and flexible system that works for your team, no matter where they’re working from. 

Get it right, and you can succeed at every project and create a lasting culture of trust and accountability.