The successful completion of a development project requires collaboration between many stakeholders, from developers and project managers to accounting and finance teams. Project collaboration is essential to ensure your team works well together throughout the process, staying aware of other team members’ perspectives, needs, and timelines. Many traditional development workflows, such as outdated and error-prone spreadsheets, can result in silos and prevent sufficient communication across your team. By implementing key collaborative strategies and embracing cloud-based project management tools, you can increase transparency across teams, prevent miscommunications, and ensure more predictable outcomes on your complex development projects.
Here’s how you can build a collaborative culture at your real estate organization and leverage cloud-based project management tools to achieve higher returns and more successful project outcomes across your portfolio.
The Importance of Collaborative Project Management
Collaborative project management is a strategy that breaks down barriers between teams to facilitate continuous planning, open communication, and transparency. The concept is meant to bring together all stakeholders on a real estate project – such as developers, investors, architects, and contractors – to play an active role at every stage of a project lifecycle, from pre-development through stabilization. When your development team implements a collaborative project management strategy, you’ll see better outcomes across the board.
Here are a few ways collaborative project management helps you foster positive communication, mitigate risk, make data-informed decisions, and ensure successful project delivery for your CRE portfolio:
Prevents Miscommunication
Successful project management requires a high level of communication, collaboration, and trust between stakeholders. Before a project even begins, your team will need to set key benchmarks, such as defining a realistic scope and budget. You’ll also want to evaluate market conditions to ensure a project will deliver returns and evaluate potential risks or setbacks as part of the due diligence process. Setting clear expectations and objectives at the start of the process and maintaining communication and transparency will prevent costly errors.
Informed Decision Making
Gut-decision making or decisions made in a vacuum can result in major errors in the development process. From vendor selection to strategies for financing or capital deployment, your team can leverage data and insights to improve collaborative decisions. Stakeholders with access to real-time data and cross-functional insights will be able to make informed choices.
Risk Mitigation
Development projects are complex endeavors and many factors can derail a project, from scope gaps in the construction process to regulatory noncompliance. Implementing a collaborative project management framework can help your team avoid common project management pitfalls. Your team will be able to identify and address risks before the issue gets out of hand and results in cost overruns or otherwise impacts the project.
Budgeting Improvements
Finance and accounting teams are often siloed on a development team, preventing optimal collaboration as capital is deployed and vendors are contracted. Budget planning and forecasting can reduce the chance of scope gaps and cost overruns. Eliminating scope gaps and subsequent change orders will help keep project timelines on track, which will further benefit your team’s bottom lines.
Luckily, your development team can access resources and tools to facilitate collaboration in the development process that past generations did not. Modern real estate development software can be a key tool for centralizing project data, facilitating communication, flagging potential concerns in your budget, and ensuring projects come in on time and on budget.
Tips for Creating a Collaborative Work Environment
Building a collaborative work environment is essential for enhancing your team dynamics and ensuring success on projects and your ability to scale in the future. Finding the right strategy and tools to bring your team into alignment is essential, and there are a few best practices successful teams stand by. Here are a few strategies that have worked for development teams to foster collaboration and communication:
Aligning Team on Goals
Bringing your team into alignment is essential for ensuring everyone understands the mission, objectives, and goals of your firm, and how each project will contribute to this vision. Establishing goals at the start of a development project can also help individual stakeholders understand their roles and responsibilities. This will not only offer clear direction, but will also prevent miscommunications and redundancy across your team.
The SMART method can be a valuable tool for teams looking to set responsibilities more clearly. SMART is an acronym standing for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time Bound. From there, team members should also prioritize tasks by impact, urgency, and feasibility. By implementing this approach, you can more clearly outline roles and responsibilities and prevent role creep or other confusion.
Frequent Feedback
Feedback is essential for your team’s growth and success, and your leaders should be strategic and considerate in how notes are communicated. The key to constructive criticism in the development field is to turn challenges into opportunities, focusing on behavior and its impact on the development cycle instead of calling individuals out. Being specific can help ensure team members understand exactly what needs to be completed, and can also depersonalize the feedback process.
Ensure your project leaders are also providing praise as part of the feedback process, as it’s important for workers to understand what is going well in addition to areas for improvement. You should also try to avoid addressing concerns in moments of high-stress or crisis, instead finding a good time to initiate an open dialogue. Encouraging your workers to ask questions, clarify points, or express their own thoughts or ideas is also a best practice.
Leveraging the Right Tools
Finding the right cloud-based teamwork tools for your team is essential to foster collaboration across your development team. Outdated workflows can result in team members being siloed and key members not having access to pivotal workflows. Modern real estate development software can play a key role in centralizing key project data, increasing transparency and increasing accountability across your project teams.
Technology for Project Management Collaboration
Cloud-based project management tools can play a major role in bringing your development team together to collaborate on complex development projects. Project managers have too often relied on ad-hoc workflows and outdated and error-prone spreadsheets to manage project data and important documents. Northspyre puts every aspect of your project readily at your fingertips for simplified project management. Cloud-based workflows will enable your team to work more effectively across every stage of development, driving growth and simplifying tasks.
Northspyre can play a key role in facilitating a collaborative culture for your development team, acting as your system of record from due diligence to stabilization. The purpose-built, single software solution is designed using automation to reduce manual data entry, increase productivity, and maximize your returns. Northspyre also facilitates stakeholder communication by automatically generating investor reports, stakeholder links, and draw requests simply and effectively. Northspyre is essential for development firms looking to boost team communication, break down silos, and foster a collaborative work environment.
Download our ebook Mismatched Software in Real Estate Development: the Right Tech for the Job to learn more about the tools and technology that will give your team a competitive edge.
