Many managers must see both the details and the high-level view of their workplace every day. They need key data in front of them all the time to make good decisions. Otherwise, they risk either wasting time or making choices that rely on an incomplete picture of reality.
One of the valuable features of a client work management platform is the ability to use manager dashboards.
With clear metrics for sales, projects, and staff utilization, it's easier than ever before to keep track of who is working on which projects, what is coming next, and how to fully utilize your team. Let's get to know what your dashboard is and how it can help with your managerial work.
Your manager dashboard is a personalized portal that allows you to see a high-level view of what your team is up to concerning project work. It gives you easy access to greater detail for clients, projects, and team member schedules.
A manager dashboard might showcase:
Once you've started digging into your client work management platform, you can start making these dashboards work for you. They'll help you achieve your managerial goals.
Tracking projects in real-time allows you to know about project issues sooner rather than later. Knowing that a project is projected to be over budget at current spend rates can help you offer your client options like expanding the budget, revising the scope, or shifting priorities.
Without an up-to-date tracking system, you may find out after you're already over budget, delivering a half-finished project while asking for more money to finish. This looks highly unprofessional to clients and leaves them with little to show for their investment.
At the same time, new employees take some time to reach their greatest efficiency, and managers who can identify early if an employee is struggling with workload can jump in and help.
By addressing issues with lack of billable hours proactively, for instance, managers both minimize loss and show themselves to be hands-on. They can help all employees get on track and keep growing.
Dashboards that are behind a well-secured portal system allow for team members, managers, and company owners to share information that is key to business success without resorting to a hodgepodge of emails, spreadsheets, and other less secure methods for sharing sensitive data.
The easy organization of a dashboard structure allows managers, who typically have many things on their minds, to reference up-to-date information while addressing team members' concerns.
If a team member sees issues with a project timeline, for instance, the manager can pull up that project in the project dashboard and instantly be working with the same details that the team member has on their screen.
Managers project authority and waste less time when they have all the key data at their fingertips. They ask the essential questions rather than having to get bogged down in background details.
Asking a team member to speed up their work or work more billable hours can be too vague and may not result in improved productivity. A dashboard can help managers in their coaching sessions to show concretely what needs to change.
Saying that a project needs to be completed using 10% fewer hours, or showing that Project A's deadline is coming up much faster than Project B's, requiring a shift in focus, will be reinforced by easy-to-understand documentation in the manager dashboard.
Team members can set better SMART goals for their upcoming months and years based on the documentation of their participation in past projects. The data can also showcase improvement and motivate further growth.
If you work in a high-volume accounting firm, your accounting project managers may be most concerned with keeping careful control over many separate projects, working to ensure that you complete them all based on their individualized timelines. Using the projects module or sales dashboards within the manager dashboard suite can help you track even a very long list of distinct projects with varied needs.
As you can see, keeping all of your ongoing sales projects organized by due date, activity and comments, or value can quickly set up priorities and help you know what to work on next. With this organizational structure, there’s no longer a reason why a smaller project could get overlooked and end up overdue.
Perhaps your team works with only one or two clients at a time, but you have many staff members who need to carefully schedule time to work on the project at their ideal moment in the timeline. The team dashboard is a great resource.
This visual perspective allows managers to see who is overbooked or underutilized and forecast needs for the coming months so that they can confidently accept a contract knowing they have the right people with the right availability to make it happen.
Creative firms, architecture firms, IT firms, and more will find the team dashboard manager views both clean and useful in their own industry as well as surprisingly flexible, with customizable fields. that can help you use the platform in accordance with your own sales and invoicing processes.
Every industry needs organized information with which to direct their future project acceptance, their hiring practices, and their approach to team management and coaching. Service industries, however, can use this information to boost productivity and profitability even more.
Managers need a lot of data at their fingertips for all the issues that arise each day. Manager dashboards that integrate with a broader client work management platform like Accelo make your managers more effective and allow them to take more on, knowing they have great resources available at the click of a button.
Learn how Accelo’s project tracking software can help track your client projects, tasks, budgets, and deadlines with ease. If you're ready to try it for yourself, sign up for a free trial today!
