How Planner may save your life.

So everything has changed - we're not at work, we're trying to work from home. Excepting that we have all the things that needed doing at home as well those as at work. Plus we're now providing counselling services to friends by phone, homeschooling our children, tech support to elderly relatives. And from today we're playing the role of political and scientific correspondent to our daughter who has asked to 'go out with her friends because Boris says it's ok."
Which bring me to project management, consider the transformation that has happened without our knowledge. Once when we wanted to know how a project was progressing, we would find the PM, and we could ask. Or we had morning stand up that would keep everyone 'on the same page'. But all that is over, these simple activities don't translate to the new remote way of working. A morning stand-up is an unnecessary stress on those with children at home; asking for an update from a PM too is not the harmless activity it once was. PM's, unless they have adopted new ways of working, will be forced to ring around the people on their project to assemble their report. Chances are their schedules are not aligned, why would they be, and so from a straightforward request, a spider's web of stress is created. People need to be their own PMO. Given a tool like planner, there is a way to manage tasks AND simple task updates - so in answer to what do I do next? Look at planner. To the question, how is the project going? Look at planner. Does someone need help? Look at the planner. Even better get alerts sent automatically.

So is there no need for project managers anymore?

Perhaps now more than ever a project manager is everyone's best friend they know how this stuff.

"The fundamentals still apply."

Manage by exception. A PM now acts as a coach, a mentor, someone to hold the different ways that people have of working together. We all knew this all along, so even though its a new world. Plus ca change plus c'est la meme chose