Why Should Teams Use Project Automation?

Automated workflows help leaders in companies both big and small in many ways. Here are some of the primary benefits of project automation:

• Perform simple, repetitive tasks, saving project managers and team members at least an hour per person a day
• Reduce hand-off, project drop-off risks
• Continuous up-to-date task status
• Better transitions between workflow stages
• More accurate and easy reporting

The reason why automation is such a game-changer for many businesses is simple: it’s eliminating entire steps of a project (or process) — saving time and money for the business.

If doesn’t really matter if you’re a seasoned project manager or not — all project management takes time, and that’s especially true without some kind of automation to help support the process.

Managing processes and workflows is so dependent on the team making sure they don’t let tasks slip through the cracks or that the process is followed the same way every time.

But if you’re not blessed with a full-time project manager to help make sure everyone saw the right updates to the project or that so-and-so knows that something else is blocked by another thing, then that means you have to.

And let’s be real — who has that kind of time?

On top of that, you’ve got a team to manage, and with the shift that’s happening in the workplace, more and more of us either work from home, cowork, or live in different countries and timezones.

This makes it even more challenging for business owners, managers, and project owners to keep a process going without losing too much time.

Therefore, the best solutions are automated solutions.

We should be leaning on technology to help us solve these new challenges.

That said, there isn’t anything wrong with businesses that choose to follow traditional project management practices.

In fact, there are many businesses and industries that benefit most from traditional project management, such as architecture and construction projects, government projects, or engineering projects.

Any type of project that is high risk in nature is likely to benefit from traditional project management—to a point.

However, any type of project, process, or workflow can benefit from project automation.

Here are some areas of even the most complicated and risky projects can benefit from an automated workflow or project automation:

• Data entry
• Task notifications (task completions, task creations, project status notifications, and so on)
• Project phases and workflows (when a task is completed, when a new task is assigned, creating new tasks when a specific trigger happens or certain task criteria are met)
• Reporting

Now that you have a better understanding of how project automations work, why they are important, and how they can help businesses, why should your team automate their workflows?

Here are some ways that teams can benefit from automated workflows:

• More efficient transitions between workflow stages
• Save time by reducing delays when handing off tasks to other teams
• More accurate reporting on tasks
• Improves sanity for everyone

All in all, regardless of your style of project management or methodology, nearly every business in any industry can benefit from automated workflows, or even automating simple, repetitive tasks that are the biggest time suck and the biggest risks.

In the next chapter, we’ll cover all of the different ways you can automate your tasks in your projects, and later, the step-by-step process to automating tasks, processes, and project for yourself and your team.