How Project Managers Can Overcome Stress

In response to my previous article, “The New Age of Project Management,” which addresses the new methods project managers must consider, our industry has newly, evolved technology that helps PMs save time and accomplish more in their day-to-day routine. Here at InnovateMR, we have several key technology development areas to enable our teams to be more effective.

Are you managing projects or managing stress?

According to TeoDesk, project management is one of the most stressful jobs out there, and the success of the project deliverables depend on the stress levels of the manager. Key to making a project a success includes:

1. Do not stay calm – there is an urgency in the work
2. Do not get distressed – optimal stress levels keep us motivated
3. Stay eustressed! – Eustress is healthy and leads to professional career development

How stress can affect your bottom line

According to a study from the Project Management Institute, increased and unmanaged stress in project managers can be detrimental to individual productivity, and the capacity of an entire team. When there is too much stress on project managers, negative emotions will surface, detracting from a goal-oriented focus. Narrowed attention spans also mean poor concentration, poor decision making, poor multitasking, and limited processes of new information.

Without intervention and a way to manage stress, project managers can quickly become ineffective and get burned out, leading to client dissatisfaction, and ultimately, attrition. Not only is this incredibly unhealthy for individual team members, it also harms your business’ potential and bottom line.

Here are a few different products designed by the innovators at InnovateMR to help project managers do more with less:

1. One of the most powerful and advanced tools is InnovateMR’s proprietary dashboard Edge. Edge has state-of-the-art features that help PMs (and other members of our award-winning service teams), in their day-to-day activities. Through automation, technical connectivity, and alerts, there are almost no ongoing manual tasks, allowing us to focus on smart and efficient work.
2. Features in our Edge software:
   1. • Executive dashboard: Helps track company-level performance across the entire service organization.
      • Leadership dashboard: Helps team leads track individual team member performance.
      • PM dashboard: Helps project managers track all aspects of their projects’ progress in one place.

   The concepts behind the Edge software have been adapted to many products within InnovateMR’s Vision Suite, including Vision Surveys, an intuitive survey builder, and Vision Sampling, an automated platform to set survey respondent requirements, view feasibility, launch, and monitor progress. The Vision Suite is available to end clients to advance their internal research capabilities.

3. Next in the PMs’ toolbelt is InnovateMR’s newly released Flight Deck. Flight Deck is a series of sample plans and templates that PMs can select from according to the project’s unique needs. This system is based on a variety of different factors, and will set the project live automatically, manage sample, and, once the target is achieved, pause the project. Within Flight Deck, there are other products including:
   • Traffic controller: This is a system designed to know how much sample to send into the field at time based on the predetermined project requirements. As part of Flight Deck’s automated product stack, this feature will control the pace of the project as per the set deadline.
   • Email alerts: PMs are alerted of important changes via email including:
     • Any scope change (IR, LOI, etc)
     • A “project on hold” alert once the sampling target is achieved
     • Sample over-quotas
     • Project end date crossed
4. As an award-winning thought leader in data quality, the InnovateMR team has developed multiple control tools to access respondent quality in real time:
   • Text Analyzer: One of the most powerful tools developed by InnovateMR is a 2021 Stevie award-winning product, TextAnalyzer. TextAnalyzer checks open-end responses in real time to remove gibberish, copy-paste, and non-contextual answers.
   • Digital Fingerprinting: An integrated tool that helps catch fraudsters based on multiple factors including unique device IP, unique PID, mac address, browser details, etc.
   • Sentry: In a new partnership with CloudResearch, we have implemented Sentry into our data quality arsenal. Sentry is a battery of red-herring questions unique to each respondent to check both the respondent’s attention and their credibility.

InnovateMR continues to provide Project Management Support and Tools

With the ever-evolving technological enhancements demanded of the market research industry continually increasing, there is always a team at InnovateMR working in the background, writing millions of lines of codes, to make our lives easier and our work more efficient. In my experience, this is the first time project management team leaders have been afforded access to such innovative tools. InnovateMR is also the only company I’ve worked at that continues these developments with zero down time and consistent client delivery. Our extraordinary tech teams including, Chief Technology Officer, Maulik Chandarana, ensure that we never have to pause projects to launch new developments.

If you are interested in learning more about the full service teams and offerings at InnovateMR, send us a note at info@innovatemr.com.

Aamod Tyagi has 7 years of experience in market research client services and is a lead client contact for the InnovateMR delivery team. As a research project management thought leader, he effectively partners with researcher professionals to ensure the flawless execution and optimization of the day-to-day operations for strategic accounts and teams. He is focused on growing accounts by developing a personal client rapport and understanding client expectations and enhancing process for a superior client delivery experience.

InnovateMR is a fiercely independent sampling company that delivers faster answers from business and consumer audiences. As industry pioneers, InnovateMR connects organizations with market research audiences around the world to support informed, data-driven strategies, and identify growth opportunities. InnovateMR has built its reputation on a relentless pursuit of customer delight. Stop working with vendors, and start working with a partner dedicated to your success.