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New Survey by Planview Reveals Organizations Face Increasing Challenges in Managing Work Productivity and Collaboration

Staff Report

Tuesday, July 24th, 2018

A new global survey on work and project collaboration by Planview, the world's leader in work and resource management solutions, highlights mounting challenges for an increasingly virtual and geographically dispersed workforce. According to the survey results from 650 knowledge workers, teams lose as many as 20 hours per month due to tools that are not integrated or centralized across the organization.

Key findings reveal the universal challenges of managing teams and projects.

  1. Everyone is a project manager. Two out of three respondents reported managing projects without any official project management title, certification, or training. These accidental project managers don't adhere to project management standards, and thus contribute to the proliferation of fragmented, siloed point tools.

  2. Teams are ever more varied and virtual. Eighty percent of respondents collaborate across functions (a 40 percent increase over the 2015 survey) while 59 percent are geographically dispersed (30 percent more than the 2015 survey). This reality means managers must address communication challenges that simply weren't prevalent just three years ago.

  3. The project management office (PMO) has a stake in the game, governing 72 percent of projects across the organization. This top-down focus on standard project management processes means more projects map back to strategic objectives and an organization's bottom line, adding complexity and accountability to projects. Project managers, stuck in the middle, must now balance the many ways their teams work against providing a standard record of progress, status updates and cost to the PMO.

  4. Too many disparate tools are hurting team productivity. Teams use an average of six different tools for collaboration, with email, audio conferencing, web conferencing, and spreadsheets at the top of the list. In addition, 25 percent of survey respondents use different tools. This results in miscommunication and lost productivity when managing projects across these disconnected tools, essentially equivalent to teams speaking different languages.

  5. Productivity is down as teams are losing more time. Teams now waste more than 20 hours per month trying to overcome collaboration challenges. Collaboration challenges waste more than time: 54 percent cited missing deadlines, 35 percent cited a reduction in quality, and 26 percent cited budget overrun. Delivering new products and services can also be at higher risk when productivity loss results in work needing to be repeated, duplicated, or scrapped altogether.

"The modern team is geographically dispersed and often virtual yet continues to heavily rely on spreadsheets and email alone. Without a centralized source of record for collaboration and work management, teams can lose almost nine weeks each year to ineffective communication," said Zach McDowell, Planview product manager. "As it becomes more complex to create today's connected products and services, teams must have access to integrated solutions that bring cross-organizational visibility to progress, bottlenecks, opportunities, and outcomes."