Your business has many moving parts. With numerous projects going on, employees working on diverse tasks, and clients with changing demands, it’s a wonder anything gets done at all. When your business doesn’t have a project management tool to oversee certain aspects of your business, it’s easy to run into trouble.

If you experience any of the following obstacles at your workplace, it may be time you swallowed that pride and got yourself (and your team) into project management.

You and your team are disorganized

Are paper piles quickly turning into skyscrapers? Has the frequent misplacement of necessary information caused you to put tasks on hold?  Does important contact information tend to land anywhere but your phone or Rolodex? If you answered yes to any or all of those, good news is that you’re not alone! When physical stacks of papers are enabling your office’s disorganization epidemic, we know to implement an enterprise content management system. When it comes to all forms of disorder, an ECM that can handle business processes is the best solution.

A project manager’s job is to organize everyone’s tasks, keeping track of all necessary materials during the process. They ensure that every piece of the project lands in its correct place and that each one of those pieces is easy to access among the appropriate team members. With an ECM, you won’t lose time scrambling to gather all the materials you need to make a sale or close a project. A content management solution keeps all information in an organized, searchable repository.

Tasks aren’t getting completed

Your team’s unintentional procrastination could end up hurting your business. Do you have dozens of projects with promising starts and enthusiastic beginnings but lack the momentum to keep them going? Have you halted the production on a campaign that bored you or wasn’t going anywhere fast enough?

If you start projects and processes, but can’t ever seem to see them through to fruition, an ECM will be your saving grace.

Content management can keep you on-task by facilitating document searches, workflow, approval steps, and accountability via audit trail. Checkpoints can be configured along a file’s path. As your digital project manager, Contentverse ECM will take a big daunting task and break it up into smaller tasks that are easier to digest, comprehend, and eventually accomplish.

Employees are confused over their roles

If your employees are wearing too many hats, they’re likely to lose focus. The more tasks you give each team member, the less commitment they’ll have towards each one. This over-tasking could result in employees stepping on each others’ toes, which could lead to unnecessary disagreements, stress and confusion.

When you continuously pile tasks on top of your employees’ already full plates, you’re making a risky and costly situation for yourself. Employees, when faced with too many demands all at once, will oftentimes unknowingly redo tasks that were already completed or will miss a very important task that fell between the cracks of everything else. If you stop confusing your team they may be able to figure out what they’re actually supposed to be doing. High demands are rarely ever the best way to go about delegating.

An ECM will split up the work effectively and give employees the direction they require to succeed confidently. Each employee will be designated a specific role, have access to certain files and folders, as well as given due dates and notifications. Think of your ECM as a task supervisor.

Employees are dissatisfied

Employees without direction are going to be dissatisfied with their working conditions. Every worker needs a solid structure of the items they need to take care of and the goals they must reach. Without that foundation, chaos could ensue. Your employees need to know what you expect from them, and how they can do their best to meet those expectations. If you’ve been concerned that members of your staff have been lamenting over their current work situation, ECM is your dream come true.

A project manager can be the lucky person to tell your employees everything that’s happening. OR, an ECM can do this for you with notifications, audit trail, version control, web access, and document access via mobile apps. No more working in the dark. Because we all know you don’t have time to manage a company and satisfy your entire staff’s needs. Leave the office managing to a software application that can handle it – and relishes it.

Get a Project Management Solution for your team

Before jumping up and hiring a project manager, look at ECM solutions instead:

• Review case studies in similar industries to make sure the ECM you’re researching can meet similar demands or has the right integrations available. Or make sure that the solution provider can offer a comprehensive API or perform custom integrations.
• Implement in the most up to date hardware possible for your budget. This ensures that your new ECM will be able to start running workflows and organizing files effectively and immediately.
• Introduce the ECM to your team with some tact and care. We recommend staying within close quarters for at least a couple of days, in case anyone has a question or concern. When a new software is suddenly running previously manual operations, some employees may feel threatened or worry that their jobs are at risk. But, if you remain noticeably confident about your decision and the future of your team, that positive energy is sure to rub off on everyone else.

The Takeaway

Though you’re going to spend some money at first when purchasing, you’ll see a vast improvement in your business. Pay attention to the day by day after this addition takes place. Keep an eye on ROI, goals accomplished, deadlines met, and projects completed. That way if you ever doubt your decision in the future, you’ll have numbers to look back on as proof of your business’ incline.

Most importantly, take notice of all the positive changes that implementing an ECM instead of a project manager has made. With less disruptions to your workflow and fewer 12 hour shifts, your calendar will gain a piece of mind. And with all that extra free time, lunch dates no longer have to be a thing of the past.

A version of this article was published as 5 Signs Your Business Absolutely Needs a Project Manager by Andrea Cochran on September 9th, 2015.