This might sound illogical at first, but businesses and universities operate similarly. They are no longer the anachronistic scholar guilds. In fact, they have turned into full-fledged organizations with excellent top-down management, a dedicated Human Resource and marketing department along with foreign programs and program extensions.
Consequently, they share similar business activities such as forming partnerships, recruiting stellar staff, and pitching creative offers to grab the attention of the brightest students. The difference between the two is that universities focus on attracting students whereas companies look to attract customers.
They both face similar challenges; funding cuts, constantly evolving regulatory systems, and increasing competition from international and local players. When both companies and universities can operate similarly, why not make use of similar tools that are used for managing business operations in universities as well?
Here are 7 key benefits task management software can offer to universities:
Make collaborations easier
Every university is aware that to make progress, sharing knowledge is crucial. Collaboration is vital for advancements. Complex projects usually involve numerous paperwork that must be available for the entire team. By using a task management software, it becomes a seamless task to collaborate.
This is because the software can work as a universal storage hub, where students and administrative staff members can retrieve and have access to important coursework documents and projects. Task management software also enables you to comment or make other types of real-time communications.
Whether you have numerous academic staff coming together to work on a project, or your alumni engagement and marketing teams are planning to co-host an event, universities excel when people are encouraged to collaborate and explore new ideas. When everyone uses a single platform, teaming up on proposals, projects, events, etc. becomes much easier and simple. This helps in improving productivity as you get the freedom to focus on results and innovation rather than learning new software and onboarding colleagues.
College life is a daunting experience for most students, especially during the first year. New students find it difficult to recalibrate from their high school routines to the new college dynamics. This difficulty comes as a result of the high degree of freedom and the other extra-curricular activities available on college campuses. To cope with these changes, many productivity apps come in handy if you want to maintain good grades and remain mentally active.
Each team gets to operate in their way
Each department will have different KPIs, goals, and preferred modes of operating. Your university’s faculty members’ way of working will differ from how the marketing team works, and every team will have their own set of goals, responsibilities, and projects.
While visual representation like Gantt charts and board views may be quite beneficial to some team’s projects, others might find task lists to be the most efficient way to assign and track work. As for top-tier strategic planning departments, it’s critical to have the ability to track the progress of multiple key projects across different areas in a single custom dashboard or summary view.
By using a task management tool, every department and team can visualize and structure their operations in any of the aforementioned ways and more. This will allow you to consolidate every operation that gets done in one central system.
Streamline onboarding & boost adoption
When everyone works on a different system, adoption and onboarding become time-consuming and costly. It can be quite difficult to improve adoption and empower people to get their desired results without knowing how to use your task management software in the right way.
Also, bespoke onboarding customized to your team’s workflow and needs can be expensive. When you multiply that across each product your university uses, for each member and every subsequent new recruitment, the mathematics department doesn’t need to tell you how quickly it adds up.
When different faculties and departments want to collaborate but operate differently, they’ll have to learn using a whole new platform before they even work together and make progress. However, with one universal task management software across departments, you’ll be able to cut down the resources and time needed to focus on onboarding. Project management software can help in streamlining every stage of the adoption journey for your team.
Keep your information centralized, secure, and safe
When each department operates on different platforms, the chances of losing important information is high.
It’s not just frustrating, leads to crossed wires, valuable space wasted by replicated files, slower progress, but the issue is further magnified because universities often deal with sensitive and confidential information.
Whether it’s student records, financial planning and funding, it’s important to ensure that only relevant individuals have access to the right files; that you’re making use of a reliable and secure tool that you can rely on; regardless of where your team is operating from; and that every individual know where to get the information they need at any time.
By keeping your team's information in one place, like in cloud storage, or using the right task management tool, you’re sure to get excellent security and granular privacy settings, which will allow you to customize what others can see at any level, be it individual tasks or projects. As such, every team and department can only access information that’s meant for them.
Ensure a consistent process across the university
Regardless of which team one is on, certain processes remain the same. For instance, say a staff member wishes to request for a piece of new equipment. Whether that individual is a marketing executive or a professor, they’ll have to communicate with the same team, like the operation department for facilitating their request. When you have a consistent procedure for critical tasks like these, it becomes more efficient, trackable, and streamlined.
Makes life easier for professors
Professors tend to have tedious schedules. Usually, they need to switch buildings to work together with people from other departments, teach different lectures, or correct papers and exams. All of these while doing their own research. As such, it gets hard to balance work-life.
However, by using a task management tool, professors can streamline their work. It can help them to schedule classes for each subject beforehand, even for the entire semester, and maintain a timetable in one place. As a professor, you won’t have to worry about missing lectures or meetings as the software will notify you whenever an essential milestone is approaching.
Student benefits
As a student, for achieving the required credits, you’ll have to attend several lectures. This means you’ll have to notes and gather resources that can get lost. A task management software can help in organizing this mess. It’ll allow you to access every important resource from a single platform, without the need to call your friends or message them to inform them.
Even if you aren’t physically present, a task management software can help you collaborate with the entire classroom, comment on your teammate’s work, or even share files as most platforms are cloud-based. It helps in increasing your productivity with proper time management.
Bottom Line
Whether you’re a researcher, HR or marketing personnel, a professor, student, or admin department, adopting a task management software will help in streamlining your work and boost your productivity. Moreover, it can also improve collaboration and communication among students and teachers, making the task of tracking student progress easier.
Bonus: If you’re interested to learn more about project management, read this article to learn about the 10 common task management mistakes.
Also, check out this post to learn how to boost productivity as a student.
About the author:
Robert Jordan, a seasoned marketing professional with over 10 years of experience, currently working as Media Relations Manager at InfoClutch Inc, which offers most sought after technology database including SAP customers list, AWS customer list with other services like data licensing, data appending etc. Have expertise in setting up the lead flow for budding startups and takes it to the next level. Have a deep interest in CX, SEM & Social Media related discussions. Always open for new ideas & discussions.
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