Project Managers are continuously being asked to deliver more within a short time frame and are responsible for delivering projects on time and on budget. But, a lot is out of your hands. You're constantly chasing people and having to remember what was agreed on, and by when. Plus, you’ll sometimes have to administer a contract that you might not fully understand. With project information increasing exponentially, you’re often getting bombarded.
The growing communication chasm
Email is still the predominant communication tool within project and client-based industries. While messaging tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams have been on the rise since the pandemic, these are generally used solely for internal communication. For project correspondence and communicating with third parties, email is the default. In 2020 alone, there were 306.4 billion emails sent and received every day and this is expected to increase to 376.4 billion by 2025.
How many times a day do you need to chase your team for project updates? And how often do you have higher-ups chasing you for project statuses?
Project Managers are frustrated, and it’s hardly surprising. Many businesses don’t take the importance of email for project communication seriously and haven’t set up processes internally for the consistent filing of project emails in a central place. Every business has employees who have thousands of emails sitting in their inbox waiting for problems to happen later down the line, and Project Managers bear the brunt of not having access to this information.
Communication challenges and the productivity drain
Project teams are constantly overwhelmed with the volume of correspondence they receive on projects or for particular clients. While smaller projects might take a few weeks, larger-scale projects can take several years to complete. The volume of emails, meeting notes, drawings, budgets, timesheets, Gantt charts, resource plans, scope documents, etc. can add thousands of documents per project. Inevitably, questions arise about decisions and agreements that have been made, and project managers need to respond to these immediately rather than spending hours trying to dig up the answers.
In a survey conducted by Mail Manager in 2020, we found that one-third of respondents spend at least one hour per day managing their email inboxes. When you run the numbers, this is the equivalent of nearly one working day per week spent in your inbox, making inconsistent email filing a huge productivity and communication drain for you and your team.
Where do we go from here?
More often than not, the fast discovery of emails would solve a great deal of project managers’ problems. Imagine a world where project teams could find any email on their project or client in seconds, without wasting time filing… You wouldn’t need to rely on people remembering. You could access any email in 3 clicks, and your team would recognise how important record-keeping is.
With Mail Manager, this is possible. Our solution was built by project teams, for project teams meaning that Project Managers will significantly reduce their risk of losing sensitive information, save time searching and filing emails manually, gain control of their projects, and easily access information that would typically be locked in peoples inboxes.
One of our long-standing clients, Adam Thornton, Founding Director of 5plus architects commented: “Our project teams using Mail Manager means that I can open any project folder at any time and see what emails have been sent, and when… Even if the email you’re looking for is six email inboxes away from you, or you’ve never directly had contact with the person you need to find an email for, you’ll be able to find it in seconds.”
For more information about how Mail Manager can solve your communication problems, download our new eBook, “The Project Management Communication Chasm: PM v Exec”, or if you want to see more, book a demo today!
