Structuring your PM Dashboard
How do you structure your ideal project management dashboard?
As I am creating articles comparing different tools from the perspective of project management, I've found myself considering an interesting topic: How do you configure your Project Management tool? As a Project Manager myself, here are the ways that I structure my own project overviews in order to optimize my efficiency at a glance and reduce the amount of unnecessary or buried leads. The first things that I consider when viewing all of my projects or tasks (ideally in one place):
What is most urgent? (deadline)
Which project is this task for? (task type and project ID)
How is it going? (progress and status)
Who do I need to contact? (linguists and client)
I find that the rest (such as word count or file type) provides useful context and information, but these are not the most essential for the constant monitoring of many projects at once as a PM. As you can see with my examples below, with Phrase TMS I am able to fully edit my overview of all projects, whereas in the free version of Crowdin only an individual task overview is available within each project’s board.
When considering the capabilities of a PM tool, it’s essential to take into account how project managers actually need to perform their day-to-day tasks with said tool, and how you can avoid easy user errors and oversights.
Also note that sometimes even more “basic” PM tools such as Asana, Notion or Monday can at least be configured to offer improved project management overviews.
Unfortunately, with some translation industry specific tools, these overviews are more static. My hypothesis and reasoning for why not all tools have this as a priority is because they weren't in fact designed as a PM tool first. Therefore, it’s important to look for the ones that actually do allow you to customize!
TLDR: Optimizing your project overview can save a lot of clicks, and should allow for "managing at a glance".
