The love-hate relationship with email is well-known. Champions of workspace transformation have long decried email as a productivity killer. Here, Kausikram Krishnasayee, the Director of Product Management at Kissflow, revisits the old debate and explains why particularly in distributed settings, when project managers need real-time interactions, it makes more sense to rely on project management tools (not emails) to meet growing business expectations.Â
Collaboration and communication are two of the most important pillars of effective project management. Collaboration refers to members of a team working together on a project, while communication addresses the flow of information from where it’s produced to where it’s needed. For a project team to be truly effective, they need to get these two aspects right.
However, a lot of project teams share information through emails. It’s slow, inefficient, and is not built for collaborations. It’s a great way to communicate messages but it lacks the agility you need for your projects to succeed.Â
Given that email was just designed to serve as a messaging tool from the start, it’s easy to realize that no well-thought-out features were built into it to facilitate project management. As a result, going the email route for your project may hinder your speed, efficiency, and productivity, both as an individual and as a team.
Here are the top five reasons why your team should not consider email for project collaboration:
1. Email Doesn’t Scale or Only Does So Badly
Whether it’s the endless threads, or the dreaded Reply All feature, email isn’t designed to be useful when a lot of work is loaded into it. Once an email leaves the level of a few memos, messages, and updates, anything beyond that is crazy to handle. And with several members of your team dependent on such a tool, things can get messy quickly.
You can still make sense of ultra-long email threads and try to figure out what the exec team was talking about before looping you in—at great cost to your time and efficiency.Â
Learn More: 10 Tips to Use Slack Like a Pro (in 2020 & Beyond)
2. Email Isn’t Designed for Managing Tasks Intuitively
Projects are essentially a collection of tasks that need to be broken into bits and carried out one after another. Assigning tasks to a team member over an email is a massive waste of time, particularly if your project is large. It can cause a lot of confusion and misunderstandings when task assignments are done over email.
But email doesn’t have this functionality or any reasonable way by which tasks can be managed. You should be able to create, assign, and track tasks which are all impossible to manage with emails.
3. Lack of Smart Workflows and Processes
Processes and workflows are a huge part of the project management matrix since they enable you:
- Automate projects and the tasks that make them up
- Repeatedly get results without having to execute work from scratch over and again.
Here’s another area where email fails to cut it for project management. Without any functionality for making workflow in step and involving team members right when they’re needed, email isn’t designed for project management.
Learn More: 5 Tips for Excelling at Virtual Project Management
4. Inbox Overload
Your inbox is already crowded to overflowing and trying to manually track projects there doesn’t make any sense. There’s no way to track tasks, keep records, and manage work in a coherent manner. It becomes quite easy for important information to get lost in a sea of unread emails.
And then, there’s email immunity. When you’ve braved it through wave after wave of emails and now you’re immune to them piling up, skipping important updates, and holding up your team’s work.
5. Email Isn’t Designed for Real-time Collaboration
It’s important to note that over time email has transformed from a messaging tool for getting informed and taking action, to a to-do list where work waits until you’re ready to do it.
Email now functions as a very effective heap where new emails are moved to the bottom and then, only looked at very later. How then can you run projects in the now and keep everyone on the same page when it takes an entire working day to hear back on your last update?
Email doesn’t work great for project management because it doesn’t offer the real-time flow that’s needed to get work done spontaneously.
Learn More: When Collaboration Fails: 4 Non-Technical Pointers to Do It Right
Tips on How Project Managers Should Use the Right Software Tool
Instead of trying to patch through with email, there are lots of other software tools out there you can use for project management awesomeness.
Project management tools are designed to simplify and systemize project management so you can get more done, faster, and with increased efficiency.
Here are some tips and hacks you can apply to get the best out of these project management tools.
Leverage Smart Task Management
To get the best use out of it, any project management tool you choose must be designed to help you:
- create tasks with as much detail as necessary to get them done,
- assign them to specific team members, and,
- manage right in one place where it’s easy to see the status of all your tasks.
Visualize your Workflows
No matter the kind of projects you’re doing, work has to flow in a specific sequence. The tool you use must let you visualize your workflow processes. Most project management tools have a Kanban board which lets you see the different stages an item has to go through before it’s complete. Jira and Kissflow Project are two project management tools that have a huge focus on processes and workflows designed to make it easy to move projects from to-do to done with minimal friction.
Learn More: 5 Keys to Improving Collaboration in Remote Sales Team
Focus on Collaboration
Communication is the lifeblood of project management since it helps you know what’s happening and what’s changing so you can determine an ideal course of action to take per time. What that requires is that you make adequate use of the collaboration capabilities the project management tool you choose offers, such as:
- chat,
- mentions,
- notifications, etc., so team members can stay on the same page.
Closing Thoughts
By using smart project management tools for collaboration, you can completely eliminate emails for project communication. You can engage your teams, get tasks done faster, and always deliver on time. If you use a sophisticated tool, you can even invite clients as guests and avoid email altogether.
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