Keep teams aligned across every project with Lucidspark

If you fail to plan, then you’re planning to fail. We’ve all heard this statement and, chances are, we’ve experienced it, too. So, what can we do within our teams to ensure that we are prepared to complete our projects both efficiently and effectively? 

First thing’s first: whether you work fully remote, in-office, or hybrid, it is essential to have a collaborative tool that gives every team member a voice while keeping the project flow moving along because collaboration and successful project management are a dynamite duo.

And remember, unexpected challenges may arise that can guide your project flow off track, decreasing collaboration, morale, and productivity.

In this blog post, we’ll dive deeper into the tools available to you in Lucidspark to keep your teams aligned, up-to-date, and moving forward. 

Keep track of important project details

Planning and executing a successful project can often involve managing lots of people and tasks. Project planners face particular challenges, including:

• Lack of structure in brainstorming sessions- Wanting to be open and welcoming for all members can sometimes result in meetings that wander, and you might not reach the goal of brainstorming valuable solutions or ideas.
• Lengthy meetings- Great ideas can sometimes come with great lengths (of time). 
• Miscommunication about tasks, ownership, and purpose- When a project has many steps and deadlines, team members might feel confused about who is doing what and when.

Lucidspark is here to help you combat these challenges and sort out the critical details involved in your projects. Specifically, Lucidspark Cards gives teams access to a single source of truth where all of the project details live and are kept up to date. This ensures that everyone has access to pertinent information at all times. 

In addition, Lucidspark Cards helps you visualize all responsibilities and dependencies, so everyone knows how their work impacts the project. Knowing this gives individuals a sense of ownership and purpose as they can see how their part directly contributes to the larger project.

The Lucidspark Cards feature offers enhanced capabilities such as:

• Designating task owners
• Indicating prioritization and dependencies
• Inserting descriptions
• Setting dates
• Converting stickies to Cards or dragging out blank Cards
• Adding primary fields like assignee, status, and date
• Adding to timelines

This feature transforms the visual planning flow and enhances each step from ideation, to planning, to execution of the project. You are now able to create customizable shapes for brainstorming and organizing all the details of each project. This feature will allow for higher visibility and reduced time editing and refining project plans.

Create visual project timelines

Lucidspark Timelines allow you to break down projects so that your team can easily see a visual for deadlines, goals, and team responsibilities. Timelines simplify task lists to help everyone stay on track and gain transparency with a high-level overview.

The Lucidspark timeline feature empowers individuals and teams to prioritize their ideas in several ways. Create timelines to increase visibility across silos, while also gaining the flexibility needed when managing a project. Project planning with Timelines takes the guesswork out of whether or not your project will be completed and successful. The tools you need are all within one platform so that you can own your tasks, manage deadlines, and plan collaboratively with your team.

Learn more about using Timelines.

Streamlined processes

Establishing streamlined processes is crucial to take projects from early ideation to planning and into ongoing collaboration with your teams. Though projects may vary, having a standardized flow will allow team members to feel more comfortable diving into tasks and participating in meetings. And team members’ increased participation and motivation will help you meet deadlines and find innovative ways to work together on future projects.

Some benefits of streamlined processes include:

• Clarity across teams
• Time and resources saved
• Enhanced decision-making 
• Purposeful collaboration among team members

To help guide team participation, Lucidspark strategically offers brainstorming templates and other features in the early ideation phase so that your session isn’t just team members shouting out ideas. With the help of templates, you can turn brainstorming chaos into a well-organized session that inspires team members to share their creative perspectives.

For meeting facilitators, the JoinID feature is a convenient way to securely send out a code to other collaborators. From there, collaborators can hop right into the Lucidspark board and start brainstorming, creating, and more.

In the planning phase, you can easily set deadlines and delegate tasks in Lucidspark with our Timeline feature. And it’s simple to adjust dates as your project progresses. Of course, if you need to adjust your dates, that is always available to you.

Working as a team within a robust visual collaboration platform like Lucidspark makes it easy to keep track of the details, maintain alignment across the entire project management lifecycle, and reduce typical bottlenecks.

Collaborate and manage workflows to get projects across the finish line

Sustainable collaboration is an essential piece of team success. Strong collaboration skills help projects get completed, meet goals, and increase productivity. Implementing ongoing collaboration into your workflow processes can yield incredible value-add for your team.

Some benefits include:

• Reduced errors
• Building strong communication skills
• Enhanced team relationships
• Flexibility
• Improved innovation
• Better task management
• And more

Though there are incredibly valuable benefits, maintaining ongoing collaboration can pose some challenges. Team members can become overwhelmed, bored, or unclear in collaboration meetings and exercises. You’ll want to keep some structure while also finding new ways to be flexible.

Using Lucidspark Cards and Timelines together brings a single source of truth to your team that’s convenient and customizable.

So give Timelines and Lucidspark Cards a try! You’ll discover an even more powerful method of organizing work chronologically, managing deadlines, tracking dependencies, and driving projects across the finish line.