It’s hard to find a project manager who hasn’t heard, “Oh, just automate it!” from their boss or client.
Like “automating it” is something that can be done on your next Pomodoro break.
Spoiler alert: it’ll probably take more time and thought than that.
Because when you’re managing high-stakes projects (or managing a team of project managers who are managing those high-stakes projects), it’s hard to know what you can even automate, let alone how to automate it—without messing up any existing workflows or letting balls drop along the way.
As one Redditor in r/projectmanagement put it:
“I try to think if I could be able to automate anything to reduce some of my time. [But] I'm working close to 60 hours a week. I'm tired.”
To make it a little easier to wrap your mind around this automation mandate (and to save you some time!), we’ve broken down:
- What project management automation is
- How it can benefit you and your team (and, by extension, your boss or client)
- Which project management tools can give you a leg up in your automation journey
If you’re skimming, here’s a quick way to jump to:
We’ve all experienced automation in our daily lives.
We sign up for our favorite retailer’s email alerts, then immediately get a follow-up asking if we want to receive texts. We e-sign our end of a contract, knowing it will flow to other signers.
In project management, the concept is similar—automation gets things to the next step quicker and more efficiently.
That could mean:
- Adding a set of standardized tasks every time a project switches to a new status so nothing gets lost or off track.
- Updating project timelines when priorities shift so everyone gets swimming in the right direction.
- Sending reports to people who need to be informed so they can make business decisions.
Most people assume project management automation involves reducing manual work, and it does. But it’s not just about that.
It’s also about minimizing errors, maintaining alignment, and enabling teams to do their best work.
What can you automate?
A good way to identify opportunities for project management automation is to look for things that you find yourself doing over and over.
For example:
- You always go through a planning process at the beginning of every project → you could turn that into a template with tasks, workflows, and dependencies.
- You always assign tasks to the appropriate resources → you could build a workflow that assigns tasks based on team member bandwidth and expertise.
- You always have a deliverable → adding automatic reminders can help you hit your deadlines and make sure that any other necessary conditions for approval are met.
- You always send out weekly updates → you could auto-generate reports or meeting minutes and send them to relevant stakeholders.
Some projects may have even more potential for automation.
Periodic budget updates, intake questions for bugs/enhancements/change requests, routine compliance checks, and knowledge base refreshes—these are all good candidates for automation.
You might get that automation brings efficiency, in theory. But what does it get you in practice?
1. Fewer bottlenecks
One of the great side effects of automation is that it forces you to take a deep look at how your processes are running right now.
While you probably already know about some bottlenecks, you’ll likely find more—especially when your automations go live.
That’s the moment of truth: will things work the way you expect? What’s missing? What could be even smoother?
By working out the kinks and fine-tuning your processes, you give yourself more time to spend collaborating with others on strategic tasks (rather than eliminating blockers).
2. Consistency
For companies that deliver services—say, content marketing agencies or Salesforce consultancies—you have a high bar for what you deliver.
And you want to make sure that your people hit that high bar on every project.
Building automation into your project management ensures that things get done in the same order and in the same way every time.
This applies to product-led companies, too.
Maybe you want to use the same regression testing process before every release. Or you want sales folks to follow certain steps because you’re trying out a new GTM strategy and want to do an apples-to-apples comparison against the tactic you were using before.
Automating those workflows standardizes people’s work, makes sure nothing falls through the cracks, and (once they get the hang of it) helps your team plow through projects faster.
3. Accuracy
A lot of project management is manual, from creating tasks to assigning those tasks to generating reports.
That adds unnecessary time, which isn’t great in and of itself. But it also opens the door to something scarier: mistakes.
While automation won’t completely rid your projects of errors, it can certainly reduce inaccuracies.
Built-in templates, centralized document sharing, and automatic reminders make it far less likely things will fall through the cracks, particularly if you’re hoping to scale your business or are already onboarding new teams.
Plus, with better data, you can auto-generate reports that reflect your team’s availability and progress more precisely.
4. Better resource allocation
One of your highest priorities as a project manager is making sure that people don’t burn out. To do that, you need to know how much is on their plate.
Project management automation can abstract away the Excel-driven parts of resource allocation, instantly flagging conflicts or over-allocation.
If you add historical data to your resource allocation workflows, AI can help you more accurately determine how long something will actually take and who should be working on it based on past performance.
5. Space for creativity
Taking tasks off of people’s to-do lists—even if they’re small—reduces overwhelm and frees up time.
That extra time can be put toward other projects, brainstorming sessions, decision-making, or even toward implementing more automation.
As with anything, there are obstacles to project management automation. Here are a couple of things you might encounter:
Unrealistic expectations
Some people (maybe your boss?) think that you can automate every part of project management.
But the truth is that some things need a human touch—or at least some extra human oversight.
Say at the end of a project, you’d like to poll a list of customers who went through a beta launch. Automatically sending them a survey two weeks of testing, without talking to CSMs first, may not be a solid idea.
Some customers may be disputing an invoice or be on the rocks for reasons completely outside of the beta test, and asking them to “do one more thing,” could tip the scales in the churn direction.
In r/ArtificialIntelligence, Redditor CornwallaceHankey used a great analogy:
“As a senior PM, I see our work akin to the anesthesiologist in the operating room. Bots can undoubtedly do the operation, but it's the human's job to make sure the patient stays alive and intervene when something goes wrong. As long as humans are responsible for execution, project managers will be needed to keep the project alive and ensure it is delivered. So many nuanced communications and unforeseeable real-world impacts.”
Your automations won’t be perfect, and they won’t be all-encompassing.
It’s your job to automate what makes sense to automate, oversee those automations, and correct them if any issues arise.
Integration issues
Much of project management automation is receiving, analyzing, and sending information upstream or downstream.
You can’t do any of that if you don’t have seamless integrations.
Knowing what you want to automate and what systems are involved upfront can help you proactively find potential problems and work with the right people and technology to address them.
1. Set practical goals
If you’re just starting to automate your project management process, narrow your scope:
- Are you aiming to reduce errors in reporting?
- Are you trying to avoid imbalanced workloads across your team?
- Are you hoping to enforce a standard QA workflow?
Nail down the one or two things you think will add the most value, and then figure out how to automate them.
For some ideas, check out this Reddit post by thepm_expert:
“I look to automate as much as possible. From the initiation of project files/folders to the templating of Gantt charts where the start date is the date it’s created. Automating the minutes of meetings, the automatic distribution of them after the meeting ends. And sucking up info from daily artifacts to prefill status reports to clients and senior management. If I need to repeatedly take reports to Excel, I use Power Query to clean and restructure that data so it's useful. Business Process Optimisation is great fun!”
2. Add automation piecemeal
Start with small, measurable changes so you can track the effectiveness of your efforts and modify them over time.
Let’s say missed deadlines are a pain point.
Slowly introduce automated task reminders first, automatic status reporting second, and so on.
A phased approach minimizes disruption and builds confidence in automation as you scale.
3. Prep your team
People are set in their ways—it’s just how we are. And some people are more adaptable than others.
The key to getting as much buy-in and participation as possible is to explain:
- Why you’re automating what you’re automating
- How the automation you’ve implemented works
- Who to contact if there’s an issue
It doesn’t have to be fancy.
You could do this in a quick Loom recording or an announcement at your team meeting and then post it within your project management tool for easy reference.
4. Adjust workflows over time
Chances are, your automations won’t work 100% as you intended the first go-round.
Maybe your team tells you that automatically prioritizing tasks by due date isn’t adequately considering task complexity or prerequisite work. Or, maybe you’re learning that your auto-generated status updates were so frequent that no one was reading them anymore.
That’s ok! Make some tweaks and test it again.
Project management automation is an iterative process that improves as you get a better handle on what your workflow truly is and how to automate what you can.
To keep your automations and your data centralized, you’ll want to work out of one platform.
Before you do an evaluation, see what your current project management software has to offer.
Your plan may already include rule-based workflows, integrations, and reminders—or offer those features at a higher tier.
But if it doesn’t have what you need, it’s time to seek out something different. In your evaluation, pay attention to:
We’re a little biased, but we think Motion is the best platform out there for automating project management.
That’s because it’s built specifically to overcome the obstacles every modern PM faces:
It provides real-time transparency
At any given time, most project managers are toggling between five or six tools at once.
But with Motion, you have one system of record.
Motion centralizes task management, prioritization, due dates, preferences, SOPs, documentation, and reports—all in one platform.
And you can set up custom views based on what tasks you want to see (say, open tasks in order of priority) and how you want to see them (in a Kanban view).
You can save these views to your personal account or save them to your workspace for everyone to use.
It eases the burden of onboarding a new tool
Motion is quick and easy to set up, with prompts that guide you through configuring custom:
- Statuses, representing different steps or team members responsible for parts of a project
- Fields, to add data tailored to your workflows
- Labels, to categorize your project data even further
- Templates, to clone your SOPs and carry with you from project to project to add structure
Once you’ve got all these basics in place, you can easily clone and adjust your templates for additional projects and manage them on the go.
Motion syncs with popular calendar apps like Google Calendar and Outlook, so you’ve got your project at your fingertips—even if you’re not at your computer.
You can even create and schedule tasks through Siri or forward emails to [email protected] to turn them into tasks that appear on your calendar.
It uses calendar-based capacity planning
On most teams, the best way to get a sense of each person’s workload is to build custom reports in your project management system.
But you can’t just rely on those reports for assigning out tasks. Why?
Because some people may forget to log hours. Others may be working on tasks for other teams. People go on vacation.
Motion’s capacity planning automatically assigns tasks based on people’s calendars (and even their personal preferences) to spread the work out more evenly and ensure things get done.
And when priorities shift—as they always do—or team members become unavailable, Motion automatically reshuffles tasks and assignments, saving you hours of manual replanning and making for a more harmonized, reliable team.
It comes with an AI auto-scheduler
When your team is heads down, you want to keep them heads down until they cross the finish line.
Motion does this automatically, blocking their calendar for a specific task with all of the context they need to complete it as soon as it’s assigned to them.
No more manual check-ins or updates—all the information they need to get started is right at their fingertips.
It codifies your SOPs
Standard operating procedures, SOPs, for short, are probably familiar to most project managers.
They help you codify specific processes that need to be executed the same way every time. For example, you might follow the same steps to onboard a client, build a website, or launch a marketing campaign.
With Motion, you can embed those SOPs directly into Motion as templates using Project Workflow Templates.
They will automatically create and assign tasks, schedule them on people’s calendars, and auto-progress tasks accordingly—effectively running your projects for you.
Project workflow templates abstract away the hours you’d normally spend tracking progress and ensuring people follow complex SOPs, giving you more time for strategic work.
If you don’t have standard operating procedures (SOPs), that’s okay!
With Motion’s AI feature, you can simply describe your project, and Motion will create a customized Project Workflow Template for you.
Don’t worry, you can easily edit the template we generate to ensure it’s exactly what you need.
Start automating your projects today
Turns out, your boss was onto something.
Project management automation is an investment in efficiency, accuracy, and team morale.
With the right tools and mindset, you can transform the way your team works and deliver better results with less effort.
Ready to take the first step toward smarter project management? Let Motion do the automating for you.
