Project management tool in Google Workspace

Tired of paying for a project management tool you barely use? Learn how Google Sheets can be your cost-effective alternative.

Is your current Project Management tool actually just a place where tasks go to die, because people have a hard time using it—and it's costly to maintain?

💎 Watch the video to see how you can use Google Sheets for project management without having to subscribe to and pay for yet another tool.

Google Sheets isn't just for numbers. It can be formatted to give you a clear Task View, a dynamic Timeline View, and even send Push Notifications to specific team members based on your criteria..

❓ Have you tried this? What do you think?

Need help with Google Workspace? Schedule a Discovery Session:

https://www.kloudgem.com/contact-us 

KloudGem tips: 

https://www.kloudgem.com/follow-resources/newsletter 

On remote work

"I can honestly say that I have done some of my best work when working remotely. And remote work for me, never meant isolated and detached from colleagues, or working in a vacuum, or not working, because early on we 

💎 1) Adopted clear and easy communication channels, and communicated our availability and whereabouts (we harnessed our tools' full capacity), 

💎 2) Set clear goals, 

💎 3) Scheduled regular sync meetings with each other and management, 

💎 4) As needed, we scheduled collaborative/coworking meetings and knew each other's strengths to rely on, and 

💎 5) We made sure that we carved out time for social chats and fun.

Not to mention that when a team is geographically distributed, remote work is more effective in enabling meetings with different parts of the world 🌎 in the morning 🌅 and evening 🌆, because no commute is involved. And yes, you can still build community remotely when some of the team members bring their dinners 🍝 and others brig their breakfasts 🥐 to the virtual meeting." — Gabriella Laszlo, Founder, KloudGem

Mind the gap!

In the life of companies, software is meant to empower people and speed up processes, not hinder. Yet, a common pitfall is the misalignment between software capabilities and actual user needs. This gap can lead to frustration, decreased productivity, and ultimately, impact the bottom line.

Conducting regular gap analyses is crucial to bridging this divide. By actively listening to user feedback and understanding their workflows, organizations can ensure that the software they invest in truly meets the needs of their teams.

Remember, no software is perfect. No software fits 100% of the needs of the users. We will always need to find the closest-to-optimal software and strive to close the gaps and unlock the full potential of our software investments!

Gaps can be closed by:

👉 Consults with users

👉 Trainings for the users: tool, workflow, team, or onboarding training

👉 Developing new features that round out the experience of the core software

👉 Adding auxiliary software

👉 And in some cases, actually replacing the software

Google Workspace -- channeling the company culture into digital form

Working in the cloud has become the norm, and Google Workspace has certainly been leading and defining what that looks like, BUT…. 

⚠️ deploying Google Workspace is not the be-all and end-all. Time and time again we have seen companies adopt the tools, but their users use them inefficiently. Making the tools available is just the start. Facilitating their use is empowering your users to achieve the company goals and 

💎💎💎 weaving the Google Workspace tools into the fabric of your organization. This is where #kloudgem comes in: we can help ensure that your users use the tools strategically and naturally.

Google Workspace tools support:

🏠 Remote Work

🏢🏠 Hybrid Work

🌎 Geographically Distributed Teams

💻↔️💻 Synchronous Work and Asynchronous Work

And the common characteristics among companies who have adopted Google Workspace are: 

📈 They want to achieve higher productivity, 

⌛ They want to speed up their go-to-market time, 

📊 They want to cut out busy work and increase operational efficiency to save on people hours, and 

🫢 They want to reduce human error. 

How the various tools can support your operational efficiency.

—

✉️ Gmail → asynchronous communication

🗨️ Chat → synchronous (and sometimes asynchronous) communication

📅 Calendar → meetings, scheduling, training, awareness, planning, whereabouts/availability, boundaries, work-life balance

🎥 Meet → being on the same page, collaborative work, sync-ups, planning, and fun

🗃️ Drive (Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, Sites, Vids) → storage, version control and accuracy,  document management, contracts, but also sharing,  communication and collaboration, gathering and connecting data, visualization, planning, design, and fun

🔁 AppSheet → data flow, apps

🪄 Gemini, Vids, NotebookLM → content creation and research

Metrics to assess the success of a software rollout

When an organization starts using Google Workspace (or any new platform, really), it's important for the IT department to establish metrics that can help assess the success of the new tools.

These metrics can include the more easily accessible: 

📊 How many active users there are for the tools, compared to the overall users who are supposed to be using the tools.

But they can also include metrics that are a bit more nuanced, like: 

📊 IT expenditures prior to and after the adoption of Google Workspace:

💎 Hardware costs (servers, laptops/desktops, etc.)

💎 Storage costs --  surprisingly, this metric is only somewhat controllable by IT, and very much dependent on user behavior

💎 Support tickets

💎 User satisfaction

💎 Change in ratio of use of approved vs. not approved applications (and cost ramifications) -- this metric is also dependent on whether the users are  fully aware of the tools' capabilities

💎 In some organizations, the time to accomplish tasks and projects can be measured 

❓ Are there other metrics you use?

Don't forget that costs can be reduced by increasing the dexterity with which employees and their teams use the tools. Customized workflow consultations can help significantly. KloudGem LLC is here to help.

Partner with the users so that they use approved tools

⛔ Most companies' IT security policies seem to come in the form of restrictions AGAINST employee/user actions, but with this approach, IT teams are missing a huge opportunity: crowdsourcing employee goodwill to protect information.

😇 Most people want to do the right thing: they want to help protect company information, but they need to do their jobs and hit company goals. 

🌊 It's like water: if there is no path, employees will find or carve a path to accomplish what they need to do. And with only restrictions being offered by IT, those newly carved paths may not be ideal from an IT security perspective: using unapproved software to get the job done, and ultimately causing IT to lose sight of or control over precisely the data they were trying to protect.

↪️But IT teams can also change that:

🤝 Communicate policies clearly, without the jargon, from the start, and repeat them often, making clear the WHYs or the issues that common alternatives create — and extend an invitation for consultations for new business needs; become a trusted solutions partner. And make employees feel that they are part of the team!

💎 This is what KloudGem does: we partner with your IT team to consult with your users, come up with processes within the approved #googleworkspace tools and features, identify gaps and build a trusted bridge between IT and users.

Need-based training goes a longer way than generic training

"Time and time again, I have run into companies where despite general Google Workspace training sessions made available to employees, users kept having difficulties with using the tools efficiently in their own work as well as in collaborative work, causing them to grumble about how bad the tools were compared to the old tools they used to use. In some situations, the grumbling got so loud that the company considered moving away from Google, back to their old tools!

🤔 It got me thinking: if the people went to the training, what made them so disillusioned with the tools?

I thought back to my own past of having been at the receiving end of software training, a good long while ago: Adobe Dreamweaver (a web development tool to create websites). I was surprised at how little I remembered about what I had learned in that training. 

Why?

🛟 The answer lies not in whether or not I got trained, but a lot deeper in human learning: whether or not, and how soon, I applied what was taught. Learning, or the retention of the material taught, is NEED-BASED: if you have the need to learn something and can immediately apply it in your work or life, you retain the knowledge much better than if you are taught something just because at some point you might use it.

Remember the saying "use it or lose it?" It's the same concept. You learn something, but if you don't put it to use immediately, you will not remember it. 

📅 At that time in my life when I got trained in Dreamweaver, I did absolutely no web development. The most I had to do was occasionally find my way around html code enough to correct translation issues or parts of missing html tags. And I could do that in a plain text editor; I didn't need Dreamweaver for it. Was the training interesting? Sure! Dreamweaver was "cool" at that time, and I remember feeling that I had learned a lot. But not using it meant that I retained, at best, just some jargon.

💎 That is why when I started KloudGem, I decided that our training is going to be much more than "just training." 

💎 We CONSULT with the users or teams to first understand their workflow needs so that we can then laser-focus on fulfilling those needs, and teach how to do exactly what they are trying to accomplish day-to-day.

💎 And when we do GROUP TRAINING, we train only on features that are available and used at the given company, so that the material fills a need and can be immediately applied." — Gabriella Laszlo, Founder, KloudGem