* This was a guest post written by Joel Oleson, originally written in 2017 about our BrightWork for SharePoint Server product. For more information on our project management solution for Microsoft 365 and the Power Platform, check out BrightWork 365.

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I have the privilege of seeing many great projects and solutions. BrightWork Collaborative Project Management Framework and software are no exception.

I was first introduced to BrightWork by Éamonn McGuinness, who envisions making successful project and portfolio management possible and easy for every organization. BrightWork has been providing project management solutions with SharePoint since SharePoint 2001.

I learned more about BrightWork through the free, downloadable Collaborative Project Management Guide. Immediately, I found some very useful insights, including an open process for managing post-mortems.

I’ve been in some companies that fear failure, and many individuals are reluctant to admit their mistakes. In one company, we had regular post-mortems whenever there were outages, and moments after every project to reflect on highlights and lowlights.

The Experience of Collaborative Project Management

Let me tell you just how different the experience is when collaborative project management processes are implemented. Everyone has a voice. Failure is not the ultimate risk that marks someone as untrustworthy.

All team members can provide leadership through collaborative mechanisms and have their voices heard. Mistakes happen, but we’ll all learn from them and find growth through making changes and recognizing ways to improve. Collaboration on what went well and what did not is key.

BrightWork provides a safe environment for company and individual growth through a collaborative project management framework with three guiding principles, as well as a free template for SharePoint that makes project management straightforward, consistent, easy, and possible.

4 Major Challenges of Managing Projects with Excel

Excel is a familiar tool, but using it for project management creates significant risks and inefficiencies.

The main issue is that Excel was not built for the dynamic, collaborative needs of modern project work.

Recognizing Excel’s limitations helps you find a more capable solution. Here are some of the most common challenges teams encounter.

1. Prone to Human Error and Data Loss

One of the biggest disadvantages of using spreadsheets is their vulnerability to human error.

A single incorrect formula, a copy-paste mistake, or an accidentally deleted row can corrupt an entire project plan without anyone noticing for weeks.

This manual process is inherently error-prone, putting project data and timelines at constant risk.

2. Poor Collaboration and Version Control

When a project plan lives in a spreadsheet, sharing it often means emailing attachments. This quickly leads to confusion over which file is the most current, creating serious version control issues.

The lack of real-time collaboration means team members cannot work on the plan simultaneously, causing delays as they wait for access or work from outdated information.

3. Difficult to Track Project Progress

Reliable project tracking is nearly impossible in a static spreadsheet. Gantt charts are difficult to create and even harder to update.

There is no automated way to manage task dependencies. If one task is delayed, the project manager must manually adjust every subsequent task.

This makes proper project scheduling and milestone tracking a time-consuming, manual process.

4. Lack of Visibility and Clear Reporting

Stakeholders need quick, clear updates, but generating project status reports from a complex spreadsheet is a manual, weekly chore.

Creating high-level summaries or an Excel portfolio management dashboard requires hours of data consolidation. This leads to limited visibility for leadership and delayed decision-making.

Trying to build a reliable project management tool in Excel often results in a complex file that is difficult to maintain and understand.

The Alternative – Centralized Project Management Software

The ongoing debate of project management software vs Excel has a clear winner for teams serious about growth and efficiency.

Moving away from scattered spreadsheets to a dedicated solution provides a structured, scalable, and collaborative environment. This shift to centralized project management helps resolve the chaos of versioning and data silos.

The core benefit of dedicated project management software is that it provides a single source of truth for all project information, from tasks and timelines to documents and discussions.

Features like workflow automation handle recurring tasks, send notifications, and update reports automatically, freeing the project team to focus on strategic work rather than administrative overhead.

How BrightWork Structures Collaborative Project Success

First, let me introduce you to the framework’s “Three Guiding Principles,”

1. Collaborate to innovate – Projects deliver the innovations, and groups need to progress and work best when the entire team collaborates.
2. Lead to succeed – The most successful projects require real leadership from both the project manager and all of the team members.
3. Evolve to grow – Successful collaborative project management is not a capability acquired in a day; it evolves and develops over

 

How to Adopt Collaborative Project Management Successfully

It’s amazing to me just how many companies are simply using project spreadsheets. I know it is the most common project management tool on the planet by far. Beyond that, most companies have unstructured approaches to project and portfolio management.

While it’s not always possible to have clear scope and roles at project start, there are some simple guidelines that can be followed to ensure everyone on the team aligns with milestones and the approach.

Avoiding Chaos with a Defined Approach

Without an agreed-upon project management method, chaos ensues as deliverables are not met, timelines continuously slip, and budgets are quickly overrun.

That being said, I’ve seen many companies attempt to add structure but swing too far, falling into analysis paralysis where speed and agility suffer. You can’t just snap your fingers and everyone is performing project management. It requires an agreed-upon approach.

Business Value of Using BrightWork

BrightWork helps organizations improve project management by aligning teams and business goals effectively.

It enables faster project launches, consistent reporting, and flexible template customization – all while making the most of your Microsoft 365 and SharePoint tools. Here are the key benefits organizations gain from using BrightWork:

• Organizational alignment across projects and project managers
• Fast project starts and time saved on status reports
• Consistent reporting through roll-up of dashboards
• Template customization for flexibility across project sizes
• Portfolio rollup across department alignment with corporate strategic vision and plan
• Intuitive insights and reports provide real-time project status
• Visibility and control, including a transparent point of reference across the organization
• Start where you are and evolve gradually
• Take advantage of your Office 365/SharePoint investment for Project Managers
• Templatized approach to delivering project, portfolio, and work management.

 

Current Industry Situation

The current situation across the industries is that the demand on teams for producing more with less has increased. Our ability to deliver has not gone up, but the need to deliver has.

How do you keep track of deliverables, due dates, and status? Keeping this information in spreadsheets or task lists leads to inconsistent reporting and a lack of transparency.

When hundreds of employees are trying to keep track of all these tasks on their own, in dozens or hundreds of different ways, you can see how collaboration and transparency become important in providing simple reporting using existing technology.

BrightWork has focused on this area of building a framework that is easy to learn, understand, and use. There are templates available for both free and enhanced reporting, which you can get started with today. These SharePoint-based templates for collaborative project management run on Office 365 and SharePoint 2016, 2013, and 2010.

SharePoint Templates for Project and Portfolio Management

I remember a time when templates were the rage in SharePoint. Instead of creating a blank site, you’d get further with a team template that already had a number of lists ready to go.

The same applies to the document center, which is set up with version control and designed with metadata search in mind.

BrightWork takes the SharePoint template model and extends it past the old project template SharePoint delivers, including solving some typical SharePoint problems!

Dashboard Focused Project Templates

BrightWork provides an enterprise-ready project management application leveraging Microsoft SharePoint.

There is a set of best-practice templates for project, portfolio, and work management that help you to focus on the right things as you learn about the things that are most important in successful projects.

• Projects and Work Tracker
• Easy navigation with a simple site map
• Metric tiles are preconfigured and configurable
• Score Card Dashboard
• The 3-minute Status Report
• Project Scheduling Dashboard
• Wizard-based Project Creation
• Project Request Manager
• Built-in Side Bar Help

 

The 3-Minute Status Report

The 3-minute status report is designed as a quick report that requires little time to produce and yet powerfully answers the key questions stakeholders have in any status call or portfolio review. The tile-based scorecards make reporting simple and can easily be configured to display what the stakeholders are asking for.

Imagine bringing all status spreadsheets from project managers into a quick edit, Excel-like interface. This makes data aggregation, tracking, and reporting straightforward.

Once the data is aggregated and reported on for each of the projects, the Project Tracker can now do its job of rolling up the data with red-yellow-green KPIs indicating health, schedule, and budget, plus a simple Gantt view.

Visible and Collaborative Resource Management

Many companies struggle to see SharePoint as more than a next-generation file sharing platform, but these templates do an incredible job of tying together the data it gathers from the projects into a detailed reporting dashboard.

This approach keeps project managers honest about their work. It also provides transparency to the stakeholders and allows resources to log their own status and provide milestones. Resource management becomes a visible and collaborative process.

Flexible and Scalable Templates

The range of BrightWork templates enables organizations to start fast with project management levels matching their maturity and complexity.

The built-in reporting gives senior executives and program managers the visibility and control they need to deliver project success across the organization and ensure happy customers.

BrightWork templates are customizable, enabling organizations to evolve project management maturity from simple setups to complex reporting. The approach encourages starting simple and growing with experience.

The approach of BrightWork is to start simple and evolve as you gain experience and maturity in the process.

BrightWork Templates Spectrum

BrightWork offers a comprehensive range of templates designed to support different levels of project and portfolio management.

These templates help organizations achieve clarity, control, and collaboration across projects while providing flexibility to customize and scale as needed. Here is an overview of the BrightWork template spectrum:

• Portfolio Management Templates – provide senior executives high-level visibility into the status and health of multiple projects across the organization, resource allocation, and new project requests .
• Project Management Templates – Site templates for SharePoint allow project managers to deliver successful projects with simple and collaborative project management and streamlined reporting.
• Advanced Reporting Dashboards – provide powerful project and portfolio management reporting dashboards to keep projects on track with real-time insights.
• Template Management – lets you customize BrightWork templates and can pull those changes into sites created from that template.

 

What are their customers saying?

“BrightWork has given us the opportunity to maximize how efficiently and effectively we manage a vast array of projects across our geographically dispersed organization.”

“Deploying BrightWork has exceeded expectations from a consistency and accountability perspective; both the number of project requests and active projects have more than doubled since deployment and we have eliminated approximately 40% of work that was historically being done off to the side.” – PMO Managers at Ascend Performance Materials

“BrightWork provided us with an economical, scalable solution for managing our project portfolio. We now have better standards for collecting project data and an intuitive tool that makes the work visible and accessible.” – Senior PMO Director at GroupHealth

“Using the BrightWork templates, we now have a much better understanding of all projects underway, as well as a system to review and manage new project requests. We have greater visibility into what is on track and what is falling behind.” – Head of SharePoint Team at Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics

The list of customers continues to grow, including AmSurg, which used the BrightWork Collaborative Project Management Framework to standardize processes with SharePoint templates.

The key things many customers are doing are looking to standardize project management with templates, leveraging SharePoint to manage processes, organization-wide portfolio management, and establishing a framework for reporting.

See more customer success stories on the BrightWork testimonials page.

Take the Next Step with BrightWork

Very happy with what I found from BrightWork. The team is incredibly helpful and offered a simple way to get started.

I recommend that project managers struggling with team collaboration read the Collaborative Project Management Guide. It’s helpful not only for project managers but also for team members who are trying to collaborate better.

It offers a common language and is ideal for teams without a structured methodology. Even an agile team needs a tool to share their status, reporting, and project-based portfolio rollups.

Getting Started with Collaborative Project Management Framework

Personally, I think there are a lot of reasons to look at these templates and read about the framework. Who couldn’t use better collaboration? Who couldn’t use better reporting and transparency? I highly recommend you check out the links to get started.

• First, check out the BrightWork getting started page.
• Read up… get the Collaborative Project Management Handbook
• Next, download the free SharePoint Project Management Template

 

I’m the BrightWork Marketing Team Lead. And like any team in every organization, we have work to track and projects to deliver. We have marketing campaigns to run, content to publish, web pages to maintain, and events to deliver.

Each initiative follows distinct project phases from planning to launch, with a detailed project schedule. We also track risks and communicate clearly with stakeholders using our SharePoint site.

Just like any other project team, we need a system for marketing work management that is simple, efficient, and agile. At BrightWork, we use our own project and portfolio management software to manage our marketing projects, of course!

Why We Choose SharePoint

I’ve been in marketing for a good few years now, and I can say that SharePoint is actually one of the best marketing project management tools out there. Using SharePoint as our marketing project management software, we’re able to:

• Manage all marketing campaigns and work in one place.
• Identify blockers and issues preventing our team from doing our best work.
• Reduce the admin burden on the team so we can focus on what we do best – generating demand for BrightWork.

 

In the rest of this blog, I’ll walk through the BrightWork Marketing Team’s SharePoint site and explain how it is configured to match our processes and increase our efficiency.

Configuring SharePoint to Match Our Marketing Strategy

The beauty of using SharePoint is that we have configured the site to support the way we manage marketing initiatives.

SharePoint is so easy to use that the Marketing Team designed this site for themselves, without any technical assistance from our product team.

Let’s take a look at the highlights of our BrightWork site for managing marketing projects.

Selecting a SharePoint Template for Marketing

Those of you familiar with SharePoint know about SharePoint Team Sites. These are websites for each project, where you can plan the project schedule, track work and issues, and organize project deliverables.

BrightWork builds on this concept by delivering SharePoint project management templates that are essentially Team Sites pre-configured to manage a project with varying levels of project and portfolio management processes embedded.

Customizing the Project Standard Template

My team chose the BrightWork Project Standard marketing project management template as the basis for our site.

The Project Standard has more processes than we need, but we wanted the ability to use the in-browser task scheduler if needed (which is not available in Project Lite).

So we started with Project Standard and stripped out the lists and web parts not relevant to us. We also kept some features for future SharePoint innovation management.

Our Marketing Project Dashboard

One of the key pages in any BrightWork site is the Project Homepage. The Project Homepage is a dashboard summary report showing all work currently in progress.

We have configured ours to show the information that keeps our marketing work moving forward.

Key Metric Tiles and Visual Status Indicators

The first thing we see on our site is the Key Metric Tiles. These metrics use visual indicators, like Red-Amber-Green (RAG) status, to show us the project’s overall health. They quickly highlight delays or problems affecting our marketing work, such as late tasks, blocked items, or cost concerns.

Open Issues Report

Next, there is a web part displaying current Open Issues. The Issues report often becomes a focal point for meetings and conversations, where we discuss the actions to fix problems.

Work Due Soon List

Next on the dashboard is the Work Due Soon list, grouped by the team member responsible.

The report shows work due in the next two weeks or tasks with start dates within one week.

These filters give the team a snapshot of upcoming deadlines and tasks that should be in progress.

Weekly Project Status Report

The latest Project Status Report is entered into the site on a weekly basis.

Any marketing stakeholder can visit the site to check the status report and understand the current state, recent activities, and upcoming project sprint plans.

Additional Dashboard Reports

Rounding out the dashboard are a few other reports. The Tasks by Status chart gives a quick glance at the overall progress of the work logged in the site, so we can answer questions like:

• Is our backlog continually growing without any actual work being done?
• Are there a lot of blocked items?
• Are there too many in-progress tasks, with throughput being an issue?

 

The chart serves as a quick visual cue to help identify any issues and increase the speed of execution.

There is also a simple Gantt chart of any upcoming team vacation days. This pulls data from the central BrightWork vacation portal, so we know when team members will be out of the office and can plan accordingly.

Organizing the Quick Launch Menu

Another key aspect of a SharePoint Team Site is the Quick Launch. It is a menu on the left-hand side of the site that has links to the various plans, reports, and libraries for the project.

BrightWork templates organize the Quick Launch according to the project management methodology. As you move up from Project Lite to Project Standard or Structured, the Quick Launch expands with additional project management dashboards.

We have modified our Quick Launch to support an agile SharePoint marketing process, organizing it into four key sections:

1.       Project Home

The top of the Quick Launch has all the most important links for team members and stakeholders. This includes:

• The Marketing Project Dashboard
• Backlog access
• Our OKR management system*

 

*The entire BrightWork marketing strategy and plan is organized by OKRs (or Objectives and Key Results).

Our marketing plan and initiatives are all aligned to one of these objectives, so the BrightWork Marketing Site is optimized to support that process.

We’ve also added a “+ New Task” link to open a new task form from anywhere in the site. It’s a very handy way to log action items from meetings or whenever an idea strikes. This makes it a simple and practical tool for idea management in SharePoint.

Most importantly, there’s a link to our Marketing Kanban Boards, giving the whole team transparency and visibility into work. Kanban Boards are a fantastic way to visualize workloads and anticipate when bottlenecks might occur.

2.     Planning

Planning is what you would expect. This section contains links to:

• Main Tasks List
• Plans for each marketing objective to focus on specific initiatives
• The Marketing Strategy Deck for quick reference

 

3.     Tracking

Tracking includes links to our KPI dashboards in Excel and Power BI dashboards, as well as some key reporting views in SharePoint.

For instance, we log a Project Status Report every Friday with a summary of the week. The most recent status report also appears on the project homepage dashboard.

We also have an Issues list where anyone on the team can flag a task or raise an issue, allowing us to develop a solution and get our work back on track.

4.     Campaign Calendars

No marketing program would be complete without campaigns, and we’re no different!

We maintain our marketing and editorial calendars to ensure a consistent flow of messaging and content that is helpful to our audience.

So in this section, we have easy access links to the:

• Email schedule
• Blog calendar
• Social media calendar

 

All three of these are actually linked to Microsoft Planners that we use to manage our content calendars.

Using Kanban Boards to Visualize Marketing Work

The primary reasons to use Kanban in project management are to move through work quickly, address risks, tasks, and issues visually and effectively.

BrightWork enhances this concept by bringing task management and agile project management to a new level in SharePoint.

On the Marketing Team, we use boards extensively, aligned with key marketing objectives and initiatives, as well as individual boards for each team member.

All of these Boards are drawn from various views of our one main Tasks List in the SharePoint site. Because all marketing work is tracked on one site and one list, updates on any board automatically refresh all site reports.

Automating Processes with the Power Platform

Our marketing SharePoint site is also deeply integrated with the wider Microsoft ecosystem. We use the Power Platform to streamline our operations. For example, we use Power Automate workflows for content approvals or task notifications, which saves significant time.

For larger, more complex campaigns, we can sync a detailed plan from Microsoft Project directly into our SharePoint task lists, combining high-level planning with daily execution.

Building our own SharePoint marketing solutions has transformed how we operate. We did not need to hire a SharePoint marketing agency or procure external SharePoint marketing services because we had the flexibility to build what we needed ourselves.

The result is a centralized collaboration hub that provides complete visibility into our project portfolio. This approach enhances our team’s efficiency and improves document management, ensuring everything is secure and easily accessible. This also provides senior leadership with the insight they need to make informed strategic decisions.

Simplify Marketing Project Management with BrightWork

Marketing project management demands a system that is agile, transparent, and tailored to your team’s unique processes.

SharePoint, combined with BrightWork, provides a flexible platform for centralizing work, tracking progress, and streamlining communication. This setup eliminates administrative bottlenecks and empowers marketing teams to focus on delivering impactful campaigns.

Our customizable templates, integrated dashboards, and Power Platform automation simplify project tracking, issue resolution, and collaboration. Contact us to learn how we can help your team achieve greater efficiency and success.

The AIRSC Report is a bare minimum tool that is necessary for a project manager to start project execution.

The AIRSC Report is not a standard project management term; I developed this report to meet specific client reporting requirements. However, these concepts are foundational to modern project management tools, including BrightWork.

In this article, I will share a template for improving project execution, monitoring, and controlling – the AIRSC report. We will also provide templates for all those scenarios in separate articles.

The Five Key Project Stages

A project lifecycle typically follows five stages: initiation, planning, execution, monitoring and controlling, and closing.

1.       Project Initiation

Project Initiation marks the formal start of a project. During this stage, the project’s purpose, objectives, and feasibility are defined.

Key stakeholders are identified, and initial resources are allocated. The initiation phase sets the foundation for the project by establishing clear goals and securing approvals necessary to proceed.

2.     Project Planning

Project Planning establishes the total scope of the project, defines or refines the requirements, and develops the course of action to deliver the results.

Despite the importance of project planning, most of the project manager’s time is spent on executing, monitoring, and controlling the project.

Depending on the project’s size and complexity, project teams typically spend 50-70% of their time in these areas of the project.

3.     Project Execution

Project Execution focuses on completing the work defined in the project management plan to meet the project objectives.

Those objectives are delivered by coordinating resources, managing stakeholder expectations, and integrating activities from various workstreams.

4.     Project Monitoring and Controlling

Project Monitoring involves collecting project performance data and converting that data into information. This information is used in creating project status reports, along with recommended actions for the project team.

Project Controlling is when stakeholders take action. Recommended actions may be corrective, preventive, or defect repairs.

• Corrective action realigns current performance with the project plan to prevent these issues from occurring again.
• Preventive action ensures future performance remains aligned with the plan, proactively avoiding future issues.
• Defect repair refers to the repair of a faulty product or product component.

5.     Project Closure

Project Closure finalizes all project activities and formally completes the project. This stage includes handing over deliverables to the client or stakeholders, releasing project resources, and documenting lessons learned.

Closing ensures all objectives have been met, contractual obligations fulfilled, and provides an opportunity to review project successes and areas for improvement.

The project or organization’s change request process governs these recommended actions.

AIRSC Report vs. RAID Log Framework

A RAID Log Framework (Risks, Assumptions, Issues, and Dependencies) is a project management tool used to track those four categories throughout the project lifecycle.

The AIRSC report expands on this concept by including Status Reports and Change Requests. Many organizations start with a standard RAID log, and a RAID log template can help centralize project obstacles.

What is the AIRSC Report?

The AIRSC report serves as a comprehensive project tracker, combining elements like an issue and risk tracker into a single project management log.

Some project teams also track project assumptions, decisions, and dependencies, along with this report.

For teams needing a purpose-built tracker, consider BrightWork 365, which brings issue, risk, and change logs into a unified project management environment.

 Contents of the AIRSC Report

The AIRSC report includes:

• Action Item Tracker
• Issues Tracker
• Risks Tracker
• Status Reports Tracker
• Change Request Tracker.

 

Teams can use a separate tracker for decisions and dependencies as needed. You can use our BrightWork 365 project management templates to manage these components.

Action Item Tracker

An action item is a follow-up activity often resulting from a meeting where the project team discusses activities, issues, or dependencies.

The action is not core to accomplishing the meeting objectives, for example, an issue or activity can have a follow-up activity.

An Action Item Tracker helps the project team to organize these follow-up activities.

Issue Tracker

The Issue Tracker helps the project manager to effectively track and manage issues, ensuring that they are investigated and resolved.

Throughout the project, the project manager will face unexpected problems, gaps, inconsistencies, or conflicts that must be addressed so they do not impact the project’s triple constraints (scope, time, cost) or performance.

The Issue Tracker is a project document where all the issues are recorded and tracked.

Risk Tracker (or Risk Register or Risk Log)

All projects are risky since they are unique undertakings with varying degrees of complexity that aim to deliver benefits. A risk is an uncertain event that, if it occurs, has a positive or negative impact on the project’s triple constraints (scope, time, and cost).

Risk can be at two levels – an individual constraint level or the overall project level. The Risk Tracker captures details of identified risks at both levels.

Once risks are identified, the tracker gets updated with results from qualitative and quantitative analysis. Later response strategies are updated on the same tracker.

Status Report Tracker

A weekly project status report is a common project management activity. Many teams use a standardized project status report template to ensure consistency.

A typical Status report contains:

• RAG (Red, Amber, Green) assessment covering delivery confidence
• % complete
• Overall Executive Summary Status
• Weekly Highlights and Weekly Lowlights.
• Next Actions.

Some teams write a project report that summarizes milestones, actions, issues, risks, and budgets, along with explanatory comments.

The Status Report Tracker contains all weekly status reports to show how the project is performing over time.

Change Request Log (Change Request Tracker)

A change is a modification to any formally controlled deliverable, project management plan component, or project document.

A change request is a formal proposal to modify a document, deliverable, or baseline.

The change request log is a vital tool within the overall project change management discipline. It provides a comprehensive list of changes submitted during the project and their current status.

How BrightWork Supports Effective Project Execution

The AIRSC report combines essential tracking tools into a single comprehensive tracker to help project managers maintain control, anticipate challenges, and communicate progress consistently throughout the project lifecycle.

While the AIRSC report is not a formal industry term, its foundational principles reflect standard practices widely supported in project management tools, including BrightWork.

BrightWork 365 unifies issue, risk, change, and status reporting. It improves visibility and simplifies stakeholder communication. Its customizable templates and real-time dashboards support project teams in managing execution phases more effectively

To experience how BrightWork can help transform your project execution process, request a live demo now.

As a millennial who graduated from university in 2010 at the height of an economic crisis, I’ve switched between jobs and roles within organizations multiple times.

No matter how much I pretended to be calm and collected, I was pretty terrified and overwhelmed every time. There is just so much ‘newness’ to contend with – the commute, your colleagues, lunch habits, what to wear, the job itself, clients, and the industry.

There are the inevitable feelings of panic about having made a horrible mistake, and sadness on your last day with your previous employer. At the same time, there is also excitement, anticipation, and energy. Your new role is a fresh opportunity to move closer to your career goals.

With a little planning and forethought, you can reduce the stress of changing roles and maximize your first few days and months on the job.

In this article, I’m going to share some general tips for your first day and suggestions for creating a 90-day plan. Let’s get started.

Preparing for Your First Day

No doubt, you want to make a stellar first impression. You are ready to dive straight in and make everyone believe you are the best choice for the job.

However, at this point, you simply do not know enough about the company and its internal workings to make the right first impression. Instead of appearing overzealous or incompetent, focus on being as prepared as possible.

I suggest a two-phased approach:

1. Know the Company and the Team

Before starting your new role, immerse yourself in your company and industry. Expand on your interview preparation by reviewing the company website, social media presence, and media coverage. Ask for a copy of the employee handbook and any relevant presentations or marketing materials to help you really understand the company’s culture.

If the role involves any software or processes you are unfamiliar with, ask HR or your manager which specific project management tools your team uses, such as Jira, Asana, or BrightWork 365.

You can then try to cover the basics with some online research and tutorials. This way, you can get started quickly without distracting your colleagues from their own work. Here are additional steps for your pre-start routine:

• Look at competitor websites and investigate industry trends to grasp the business landscape you are entering.
• Connect with your new team on LinkedIn, and if possible, meet them in person before you start.
• Practice your commute a few times and have a backup route ready just in case of unexpected traffic or delays.
• Finally, confirm your start time and important information, such as parking norms and dress code, with HR.

2. Nail the Basics

Morning routines can be easily disrupted by small mishaps like hitting the snooze button too many times, traffic, misplaced keys, or a forgotten phone. To avoid any extra stress on your first day, use the day before to:

• Pack your bag, including any required documentation.
• Decide what you will wear in advance. While this may seem trivial, you will save time and energy with one less decision to make.
• Prepare your breakfast, lunch, and any snacks. Munching on sugar-laden treats in a rush is not a great way to start your day!
• Make sure your keys are within reach.
• Relax and try to get a good night’s

At this point, you are familiar with your company and team, know where you need to be and when, and have prepared for a stress-free morning. The next step is getting to the office on time before jumping into your first day!

4 Tips for Surviving Your First Day

First things first – remember to enjoy your first day. Focus on learning as much as possible about it, but don’t worry too much about starting new tasks straight away.

1.       Build Connections

Even if you have met your team before, introduce yourself to everyone again and meet the wider team.

Using an individual’s first name helps to build trust and rapport, so try to address each person by name. If you can’t remember – just ask! Accept invitations for coffee or lunch.

2.     Observe and Learn

Be curious: ask questions, attend meetings, and learn how the team works and makes decisions. Find out about current and upcoming projects, and any key initiatives you should know about.

Avoid comparing your new team to previous employers, as this may be viewed as very critical, so it’s best to park these thoughts for now.

3.     Clarify Expectations

You should also confirm your responsibilities and onboarding plan. Set up a meeting with your manager to clarify what is expected during the first few weeks, or better yet, offer to prepare a 90-day plan to outline your early goals.

4.     Focus on What Matters for Project Managers

The above suggestions will help anyone starting in a new position. Project managers also need to get to grips with a range of areas, including project management processes and tools, the project pipeline, and clients. This simply isn’t possible on your first day, so a 90-day plan will help you settle in efficiently.

Your 90-Day Plan

A plan brings order to a stressful situation and helps to align your efforts with organizational success metrics. Developing the plan demonstrates your commitment to the role and ensures you acquire the necessary skills and experience swiftly.

Once the plan is prepared, ask your manager for feedback, including key milestones and metrics for success.

A word of caution – there are instances when you will need to launch a new project or take over a current project almost immediately.

Avoid the temptation to jump in without completing essential onboarding tasks in your first 30 days. You may need to adjust the plan if necessary, but cover the basics to prevent confusion.

The First 30 Days

Your mission is to help your team and organization succeed. During your first 30 days, you should:

• Learn how projects are managed within your organization, including request management, preferred project management methodologies (such as Agile, Scrum, Kanban, or Waterfall).
• Review templates, reporting, resource management, and communication styles.
• Study the company’s long-term strategy and roadmap. A new manager needs to grasp the challenges, opportunities, and internal cultural norms associated with each situation.
• Understand current projects by reviewing project charters, collaborative project sites, and meeting with the project management office or other project managers for practical insights.
• Identify metrics of success and their sources.
• Become familiar with key stakeholders, clients, and vendors.
• Become familiar with the company’s tool stack and foundational documents like the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) and project Gantt chart.
• Meet with each member of your team to gain further clarity into their role, challenges, motivators, goals, and communication preferences.
• Set a regular meeting and reporting schedule.
• Spend time reflecting on your leadership style, priorities, and the current team environment.

Essential Project Management Skills to Demonstrate and Develop

Your first 90 days are an important period to demonstrate and develop your project management skills.

Use the first 30 days to observe how the team operates. After that, you can spend the next 60 days actively practicing your technical (hard skills) and interpersonal (soft skills) abilities.

This is also your chance to show your critical thinking and apply problem-solving skills to new challenges.

The Next 30 Days

The next 30 days are an opportunity to build a strong project management culture, set expectations with your team, and refine your working habits.

Project managers need to be resourceful and connected, so make sure you meet all of the ‘right’ people throughout the organization. Instead of a formal meeting, grab a coffee to chat about their department, role, and needs.

Taking Ownership of Project Health

Take ownership of project health by focusing on budget management, practicing risk management to identify and address threats, preventing scope creep, and understanding the performance indicators (KPIs) that define success.

Setting Team Expectations and Aligning Goals

Share your expectations with the team and work together to reach a consensus. Try to reflect on these questions:

• What does success look like?
• How will the team measure, track, and report on their activities?
• Do you want to change any current ways of working?
• How are you going to help individuals achieve their goals?

Getting off-site for a few hours is a great way to work through these points with the team and mark the transition to your leadership.

Managing Time and Avoiding Unproductive Habits

The first few months of a new job are a whirlwind, making it too easy to develop unproductive habits. With your priorities in mind, track your time to ensure you are working on important activities and figure out how to add value each week.

Look for any time-wasters such as badly run meetings, email, or an overloaded schedule. It is important to use your time wisely and intentionally so invest in time-management training. Additionally, documenting activities provides a solid foundation when reporting to your manager.

Finding a Mentor for Development

Find a mentor to guide your personal and professional development. A mentor is a trusted advisor who helps shape the character, values, self-awareness, and empathy of the mentee (individual undergoing mentorship). Learn about your mentor’s goals and projects, and offer to help where possible.

The Final 30 Days

By now, you have a firm understanding of project management practices in the company. You have spent time getting to know your team and key people, establishing ways of working and metrics for success. Your final 30 days are an ideal juncture to review your progress to date and seek feedback from your peers.

Document any learnings, observations, or challenges to tackle in the coming months. Consider new processes or amendments to existing processes or team alignment, and note any additional training you need.

Reflect on communication habits, decision-making, and other common patterns that really matter to your team and organization. These are your future focus. Finally, schedule a review meeting with your manager to discuss overall progress and the implementation of the 90-day plan.

Planning for Long-Term Success After Your First 90 Days

Getting through the first 90 days is a milestone. Now, you can focus on long-term growth.

Your 90-day review is a good opportunity to create a professional development plan with your manager.

Commit to continuous learning and set goals like earning a PMP project management certification to build your expertise and move forward in the organization.

When an organization takes on a new project, managers are tasked with finding ways to produce results on time and, ideally, within budget. This often starts with a comprehensive project plan.

For smaller projects, this task may not present an issue. For large projects (particularly those carried out by several teams in different locations), a methodology becomes essential to streamline the process and reduce the potential for error. Fortunately, project managers focus on precisely this issue.

Why Project Management is Essential for Delivering Results

Project management is a system of tools and processes that help managers analyze the progress of their projects. While there are multiple approaches to choose from, all project management methodologies offer numerous project management benefits to organizations.

This list highlights eleven notable benefits of using project management to oversee and improve the delivery of goods or services.

The Benefits of Great Project Management

Project management delivers measurable value across efficiency, stakeholder engagement, team development, and strategic alignment.

These eleven project management benefits illustrate why structured approaches help organizations consistently achieve better outcomes and long-term success.

1. Improved Efficiency

Project management provides a system of tools to reduce unnecessary costs and reduce the potential for error in a project. Defining a clear project scope and establishing clear objectives from the outset are key to this.

With less time lost to unexpected problems or expenses, often managed through effective task management and adherence to realistic timelines, services can be delivered quickly and effectively. Also, strong resource management ensures that all assets are used wisely.

2. Enhanced Stakeholder Satisfaction and Engagement

The reduced costs and increased efficiency of project management lead to satisfied customers and broader stakeholder satisfaction. When customers receive satisfactory performance that is both faster and cheaper, it becomes highly likely that they will utilize an organization’s services again.

Effective stakeholder engagement is supported through a well-defined communication plan, which includes regular progress reporting and maintains transparent communication with all involved parties.

3. Greater Team Development

The satisfaction of completing a job boosts team morale and leads to improved performance in the future. This is a significant project management benefit for team cohesion. When teams are happy with their results, they are more likely to innovate, potentially reducing costs even further and improving overall productivity.

4. Improved Reputation

Positive results in project delivery can lead to a higher reputation for both teams and the organization as a whole. This is one of the key project benefits. Teams gain the recognition of their colleagues and managers, while organizations benefit from an increased standing among their competitors and future clients.

5. Additional Opportunities

Tied closely to the previous point, increases in reputation often lead to additional project opportunities in the future, resulting in more work for teams and, consequently, a greater financial reward.

6. More Flexibility

One of the great benefits of project management is that it allows managers to more effectively anticipate costs and analyze potential problems, leading to more informed decision-making throughout the project lifecycle.

While some deviation from a plan may be inevitable, project management provides teams with the tools to quickly reassess the project and adapt as necessary, often involving a structured change control process. This adaptability is important for navigating unforeseen challenges and achieving project success criteria.

7. Effective Risk Management

Through effective risk management, project management allows teams to anticipate problems well before they affect results, enabling proactive problem-solving. By anticipating issues and leveraging data-driven insights, teams can adjust as necessary and, ideally, reach a point where the problem can be avoided, including preventing scope creep.

8. Better Quality Deliverables

The great argument in favor of project management is the ability to create a better overall result. This specific benefit of project management is often a primary driver for its adoption. Project management not only reduces the potential for error, but it also provides pathways to greater innovation and consideration of how a project can be improved.

9. More Projects

In line with increased efficiency and better resource allocation, a reduction in the delivery time of an individual project allows more time to take on additional projects. This happens while still providing a manageable team workload management, effectively optimizing resources across the organization.

10. Ensuring Strategic Alignment and Goal Achievement

A significant advantage of robust project management is its role in ensuring strategic alignment. Projects are more likely to contribute directly to broader organizational goals when properly managed.

This involves clearly defining how each project supports specific business objectives and achieving strategic goals. This alignment ensures that resources are invested in initiatives that deliver maximum value to the business.

11. Driving Continuous Improvement and Organizational Learning

Effective project management fosters a culture of continuous improvement. By systematically reviewing project performance, valuable lessons learned can be captured and disseminated.

This knowledge sharing, supported by thorough project documentation, helps in refining and standardizing processes for future endeavors. Adopting standardized processes based on past successes and failures leads to ongoing enhancements in efficiency and effectiveness across the organization.

Key Takeaways

• Applies to organizations of all sizes and project types.
• Encourages proactive planning, issue anticipation, and ongoing performance analysis.
• Equips project managers with effective tools and structured frameworks.
• Supports better project delivery with fewer errors and lower costs.
• Improves team efficiency and stakeholder satisfaction.
• Enhances client or customer outcomes through consistent execution.

 

Deliver Better Results with the Right Project Management Tools

From streamlining delivery and managing risk to boosting stakeholder satisfaction and strategic alignment, project management delivers consistent, measurable advantages across teams and industries. But these benefits are only fully realized when paired with the right tools and frameworks.

BrightWork 365 helps organizations achieve these outcomes with Microsoft 365-based project management solutions that are easy to adopt, scale with your needs, and support continuous improvement.

With ready-to-use templates, real-time reporting, and collaborative project sites, BrightWork makes it easier to start quickly and evolve confidently, no matter your team’s size or maturity.

See how BrightWork 365 can support your project success. Watch our demo to learn more.

What is a Project Health Check?

Project teams deal with the possibility of failure every day. There are numerous reasons why projects fail, many of which can be avoided with a project health check.

A project health check enables the team to pause daily tasks and objectively evaluate the actual status of the project. The evaluation will identify potential problems that may arise during the project planning phase.

Benefits of Project Health Check

Benefits of conducting a project health check include:

• Identifying potential issues early to save time and reduce costs.
• Overcoming current challenges and mitigating risks.
• Ensuring the project requirements and objectives remain relevant and clearly understood by the team.
• Verifying adherence to established practices and business processes to maintain the quality of the final deliverables.

 

7 Factors to Include in Your Project Health Check

The tools and methods, such as Microsoft project management tools, to complete a project health check will depend on the project’s scale and relevant local guidelines.

The output is typically a comprehensive report that highlights problems, identifies potential risks, and suggests actionable solutions. Some organizations use external auditors to obtain an unbiased evaluation.

The project health check may occur at scheduled intervals or address unexpected issues. Here are seven factors to include in your next assessment.

1. Business Case

Before examining the status of the project, it is important to consider if the original business case is still relevant.

Compare work completed against the initial objectives and metrics. Ensure the team fully understands the business case and the purpose of the project.

For guidance on preparing a thorough project report, refer to this guide on effective report writing.

2. Budgets

Budget overruns often lead to project failure. Examine the systems and processes for controlling, approving, and tracking costs.

A useful way to assess project costs and performance is Earned Value Management.

3. Risk Management

Project risk is always present and must be managed proactively. During the project health check, confirm the existence and application of a risk management plan.

Are risk assessments conducted regularly, and are identified risks addressed promptly?

4. Quality Control

Quality is as essential as time and scope in project constraints. Refer to organizational processes and agreed deliverables to determine if the quality is an issue.

5. Communication

Providing support and guidance to your project team is critical. Lack of communication and internal conflict can quickly derail the project.

Ensure the team collaborates effectively. For example, is everyone using the collaborative project site to track and update their work?

You should also review the stakeholder engagement plan and external communications to maintain alignment.

6. Roles and Responsibilities

Verify that team members understand their roles. If a defined role has evolved during the project, confirm that the changes were documented and clarified with relevant team members.

7. Resource Management

Project success is closely linked to the adequate availability of the right resources when needed. Consider if resources were used efficiently and shared as needed.