If you’re here, you're likely helping to make project management a priority at your organization. Which is amazing - we’re so proud of you!
And if so, we hope this is the perfect guide to get you started.
Our goal here is to help you highlight the importance of project visibility to your organization and develop a practical plan for making it a reality.
What you’ll learn in this article
- The problem with not showcasing project visibility
- How to develop a project communication plan
- How to create a project status report
- How to create a project knowledge base
- How to spin up easy-to-access project views for stakeholders
- How to foster accountability through project visibility
The tools you need to make project visibility a reality for your organization
What is project visibility?
Project visibility is as simple as it sounds, but it takes a fair amount of work on your part to showcase.
Essentially, project visibility refers to the plan and expectations required to complete a project successfully, as well as the ability for stakeholders to see that plan and understand progress at a moment's notice.
Some questions and details that should be available to access easily include
- The goal of the project
- The people responsible for each element of the project
- The due dates and details for each task and, if necessary, the reasoning behind a delay in tasks
- Specified views that showcase specific areas of the project at a moment's notice
- The project resources and completed assets
What happens when project updates aren’t easy to view?
Of course, the most obvious negative of a lack of visibility is goals falling off track.
When leadership team members decide to prioritize a project, it’s so important for either the project leader or project manager to really take the reigns and ensure every aspect of that project is planned out so unexpected tasks don’t delay its completion.
However, a lack of project visibility can also increase the chance of risks (like scope creep or going over budget.)
Additionally, it can create tension among teams and foster a lack of accountability.
Finally, we want you to look out for yourself and your career, too.
If you’re not showcasing the hard work you are doing and all the crucial elements that you’re helping the company prioritize, it can be a serious risk.
Being vocal about your work allows you to both ensure job security and can help you position yourself into a new role or promotion.
How to showcase project visibility
Implementing a process where you prioritize project visibility in your organization can seem daunting at first, but with the right tools and approach, it can be a seamless process.
Below, we’ll break down our favorite tips on how to ensure project visibility and success.
# 1 - Develop a project communication plan
This is a step that many companies skip, but it can seriously improve team accountability and expectations.
According to Grammarly’s State of Business Communication, one in five business leaders reported they lost business as a result of poor team communication.
While this isn’t something you need to create for every single project, having a general documented SOP for project communication can sincerely help keep projects on task, clients pleased, and team member tension low.
So, what should your project communication plan include?
- Showcase clear project goals—According to a KPMG study, a lack of clear goals is the most common factor (37%) in project failure. That means reiterating CLEAR and easy-to-understand goals needs to be a priority for all Project Leads. The communication plan is a great place to reiterate these goals so you can encourage team members to remember them when evaluating competing priorities.
- Determine where communication needs to happen - this is imperative. Communication should likely live within the tasks and plan themselves. NOT inside team messaging applications. Making this clear up front ensures team accountability.
- Determine when communication needs to happen - Later, we’ll talk about required updates. Once you determine what those should be and how they should be documented, include them in your communication plans.
- Explain how to use and communicate within tasks - This information should go within your communication plan and inside your knowledge base. But essentially, it’s important to document how communication is expected when tasks need clarity, will be delayed, etc.
- Explain who to communicate with and when - The communicate plan is a great place to identify project leads, department leads, project sponsors, and more. It can also indicate when team members will need to pull in each person.
#2 - Create a project knowledge base
A project knowledge base is a centralized database with a collection of all of the information needed to understand how the project can be completed.
It’s an excellent place to hold FAQs, tutorials, important files, expected dimensions, and more.
This is especially important for teams that utilize project management tools to map out their tasks.
While this may seem intensive, it can save a significant amount of time for the project manager. This is because it decreases repetitive work, increases autonomy, speeds up onboarding, and standardizes your best processes.
So, what should your knowledge project knowledge base include?
- An introduction to your project management tool
- How to create a task
- How to update a task
- How to create custom views
- How to share a project update
- How to complete commonly seen project tasks
- FAQs about the project itself.
Again, just like your project communication plan, you can create a templated resource for the project knowledge base that you can recreate and customize for each large project.
#3 - Create custom project views for stakeholders
According to Plaky, there is a 40% difference in project success rates between organizations where leadership makes decisions in less than 1 hour instead of those that take up to 5.
That means project managers must ensure that all leadership team members involved in the project's success have custom views that can give them the information they need in one quick glance.
You can easily do this within your project management tools by utilizing features like labels, tags, and statuses for each tag.
You also want to ensure the tool has view options such as board view, kanban, calendar, and list view, and then identify with each leader what views are their preference.
For example, if you need a VP of Marketing to talk to her team about a specific delay, you can simply send her a custom link to the project that showcases past-due tasks from either individual team members or the entire team and showcase them in a board or list view, depending on her preference.
#4 - Request async project updates
On a weekly basis, it’s important to get consistent updates from the individuals in the trenches of the project.
This adds a layer of accountability, surfaces any issues or bottlenecks in advance, encourages planning ahead, and will give the project manager or lead information that can be shared in their project status report.
The challenge here is getting team members to do this regularly and ensuring that when they do, they give enough detailed information.
A great way to ensure these are completed is by creating a recurring weekly task on Fridays for all team members involved. The task should be templated so it’s easy to recreate for each team member.
It should ask questions like…
- What did you complete for Project X this week?
- Did you run into any challenges while completing these tasks?
- Are there any wins you’d like to share regarding Project X?
- How was working with your teammates on these tasks?
- What tasks will you be in charge of for Project X next week?
- Do you foresee any potential challenges in completing those tasks?
- Is there anything else you’d like to share in regards to Project X?
#5 - Create regular project status reports and share updates via video
Project status reports are your opportunity to showcase your project's wins and sometimes even setbacks with all stakeholders involved.
It’s also a great opportunity for you to update team members on changes to the project and reiterate preferences.
Some items you should include in your project status report include…
- Overall project status
- Completed milestones
- Completed tasks
- Incomplete tasks
- Overdue tasks
- Upcoming tasks
- Potential blockers
- Potential risks
- Wins and shoutouts
- Learnings
Depending on your team and how meeting-heavy your organization is, these can, of course, be delivered in person.
However, if you’re trying to ensure the people involved in completing the project have as much focus time as possible, a video update that showcases your screen and project dashboard is an excellent alternative.
Tools to help with project visibility
To build off of all the suggestions we showcased above, we thought it would be helpful to showcase our favorite tools for creating project plans, knowledge bases, visual reports, and asynchronous updates.
Motion
Motion is an AI-powered project management solution. It integrates with your and your teammate’s calendars and automatically adds tasks into different time slots in the day to help each person be their most productive self.
It also allows you to reschedule your day with the help of AI whenever something comes up or is pushed back.
Motion is the perfect home for your projects and is a great tool to showcase project updates, status reports, and views and ensure your team is both focused and prioritized.
Features
- AI-driven task scheduling and prioritization
- Automated project workflows
- Intelligent calendar management
- Meeting scheduling assistant
- Email integration for task creation
Tettra
Tettra is an AI internal knowledge base that helps your team document and access your most important processes.
With Tettra, remote teams can enable new team members to be successful on the projects they are assigned as quickly as possible.
Of course, we’ve included Tettra on this list because we feel it’s the PERFECT tool to use for your project knowledge base.
Features
- Create content inside Tettra's simple editor
- Store answers to consistently asked questions
- Store best practices on how to complete common tasks
- Instant AI-powered search and answers
- Identify knowledge gaps instantly
Loom
Loom is a video messaging platform that empowers its users to communicate more effectively wherever they are.
With Loom, remote users can send team members video messages to better explain a challenge or update.
In these videos, they can even share their screen and better explain the situation, which is PERFECT for project status reports.
Features
- Asynchronously record your screen and yourself at the same time
- Edit your videos instantly to prevent the need to rerecord
- Share or embed your video anywhere you work
- Access video and viewer analytics
- Utilize AI workflows to instantly turn your videos into text-based documents
Why Motion is the best tool to help with project visibility
It’s our firm belief that without a project management tool, project visibility is close to impossible.
And while we know there are quite a few project management tools available, none have quite mastered the ability to balance tasks, personal commitments, and calendar appointments as well as Motion.
Below, we’ll break down the areas where Motion can specifically help with project visibility.
Project management
With Motion, you can create workspaces and projects with individual tasks, attach documents, create labels, take detailed notes, add comments, and more.
With Motion’s project management functionality, project leads can…
- Add tasks directly onto their team members calendars at a time that works best for them
- Build each person a prioritized, customized schedule that can easily be viewed by multiple team members
- Automate 90% of project planning needs so they can focus on deeper work like stakeholder comms and reporting.
Agenda view
Motion offers multiple ways to view tasks—Gantt, Kanban, list, and the newly released agenda view.
Now, agenda view is a chef's kiss.
While Motion's calendar view lets you see everything in a day, all those tasks and events can get overwhelming, especially if you're not used to that level of scheduling.
Motion recognized the need for something simpler—a view that lets you zero in on what matters without the distraction of a packed calendar.
Project updates
When you're implementing project updates, Motion is the perfect solution to streamline the process.
With Motion, you can create templated, recurring tasks that automatically appear on your teammates' calendars.
Imagine this: a team member realizes they won't meet a deadline, and you're scheduled to review their work next.
You had originally blocked out 2 p.m. to complete your review, but since they need to push back their task, your task adjusts automatically.
Motion not only reschedules your task to a time that works best for you but also sends you a notification about the change.
If rescheduling affects the final deadline for the sequence of tasks, everyone involved gets notified, keeping the entire team in the loop.
You can prioritize tasks and rest assured that if they're not completed by the original time, Motion will automatically reschedule them.
This dynamic adjustment keeps projects on track and ensures team members are always aligned.
There’s also a pivot table that helps you better navigate tasks across projects.
For Excel users, this concept will feel familiar - you can group tasks by any field in multiple nested layers.
Dedicated focus time
Many teams using Motion face the challenge of tight deadlines and overwhelming workloads.
They appreciate how Motion enhances project visibility by showing whether deadlines can be met and how much lead time is available.
By breaking down tasks and helping to reprioritize the week, Motion enables teams to complete intensive projects and actually get time back in the process.
Motion can also showcase who is the busiest on the team, allowing managers to shift work and balance capacity effectively.
By highlighting bottlenecks and identifying the best person to move tasks forward, Motion helps decision-makers maximize output and keep projects on track.
Instead of struggling with too much to do, teams can focus on unblocking tasks and maintaining momentum toward their goals.
Get started with Motion today
We hope we’ve convinced you that Motion is absolutely one of the best ways to ensure project visibility.
With its intelligent task scheduling, seamless calendar integration, and intuitive user experience, Motion has revolutionized the way we work.
Ready to transform your productivity, enhance team collaboration, and reach more team goals through AI-powered project management?
Start your 7-day free trial with Motion today.
