Project Management Statistics 2021

The stats presented in this report were gathered by surveying 437 unique respondents in December 2020. Respondents came from businesses across a range of industries, niches and countries.

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Section 1: Task management & to-do lists
Section 3: Communication with clients
Section 5: Deadlines
Section 2: Cross team visibility
Section 4: Internal communication
Section 6: Time tracking & project profitability

01

Task management & to-do lists

88% of people make a list of tasks to manage the work they need to do in a day.
44% of people manage their task list on paper, 35% use task management software, 11% plan out their days in a spreadsheet, while the remaining 10% use ‘other’ tools.
95% of people feel having a list of tasks to do each day is good for their mental health.
Only 11% of people have confidence that they never miss or forget tasks they have due – with a staggering 20% of people saying they miss tasks ‘regularly.’
Over a quarter of people (26%) say they find it difficult to plan out and prioritise their daily tasks and workload.
96% of people feel that having a to-do list to work through makes them more efficient and productive.
80% of those who DON’T create a task list feel that doing so would make it easier for them to plan out their work – and 90% of them say they miss or forget tasks occasionally or regularly. …so why don’t they do it? The results were split almost evenly between not feeling it’s necessary, finding it too much effort, lacking a system to do it, or wanting to focus on the ‘doing’ rather than ‘planning.’

02

Cross team visibility

94% of people feel that having a good view of what their teammates are working on improves productivity and efficiency in a business.
Less than half (42%) of people say they find it easy to understand what other members of their team are working on at any given time.

03

Communication with clients

67% of people say they mainly communicate with clients using email, dwarfing other channels including 8% phone calls, 9% project management software, 8% online meetings and 5% face to face meetings.
Just 49% of people say email is their preferred way to deal with businesses as customers, with 25% saying they prefer to use project management software.

04

Internal communication between teams

Email is the dominant tool for communicating between teams – it’s used by 75% of people who collaborate with other people in a team. 68% use phone conferencing, 59% use online collaborative tools such as Google Docs and Sheets, and 38% use a project management tool like Project.co.
An astonishing 92% of people say they believe collaboration with their teammates could be improved.

05

Deadlines

As a whole, more than 1 in 10 people say they ‘rarely’ or ‘never’ hit their deadlines.
Where people use a daily task list that lays out their work for the day, they are 31% less likely to ‘rarely’ hit deadlines and 68% less likely to ‘never’ meet them.
Only 16% of people say they ‘always’ hit their deadlines.
People who use a daily task list are 21% more likely to hit their deadlines.
44% of people don’t use a project or task management software tool to keep their deadlines visible – which naturally makes it more difficult for deadlines to be managed and met.

06

Time tracking & project profitability

Remarkably, 15% of businesses which bill clients according to time spent on projects told us they don’t actually track that time at all.
Where businesses DO track time spent on projects, only 13% believe it’s tracked ‘extremely accurately’ with 35% saying it’s not tracked very accurately at all.
Only 34% of people use a dedicated time tracking tool.
60% of people who DO track time spent on projects say they don’t retrospectively use this data to identify efficiency in their projects.

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