How to Develop a Productive Localization Team Using TMS Tools

To manage a business localization project effectively, you need money, time, and skilled professionals. More than everything else, you need to have a system in place that’ll bring out the best in your team. For professional project managers, building and managing a localization team is a real challenge. Especially when you have more employees working at remote locations.

Using professional translation project management systems is becoming more widespread in the translation industry. These tools come with amazing features that help you effectively manage your translation teams and other project resources.

Using a Localization Management System for Effective Team Management

If you are an enterprise managing localization tasks for different markets or a language service provider that has to handle large-scale localization projects, you should have a professional TMS tool for managing their localization team’s performance and productivity.

Defining Roles and Responsibilities

It all starts with having a clear sense of one’s accountabilities and responsibilities in an organizational setup. Project managers must communicate with each team member their job responsibilities and what they are accountable for at the end of the day. In a localization project, you may have localization project managers, content marketers, translators, developers, designers, QA specialists, and LSPs, who will be responsible for doing their part of the job and collaborating with other teammates at the same time.

Depending on the scope of your localization project/s you can have more or fewer people in your team. From the beginning, all your team members should know about the hierarchy and reporting structure and their authority to access and use the resources.

Streamlining Workflows

Now as you have assembled the team, it’s time to have an optimized infrastructure in place that promotes high work efficiency in your team members. Manually managed workflows can be chaotic and time-consuming. Using a localization management platform can make things easy for you by automating the file management and task workflow. It’ll support your translators and other team members to seamlessly get away with everyday tasks because everything is well organized. So, having a professional TMS tool can speed up your localization tasks and help you finish your everyday workload in time.

Establishing Proper Communication Channels

Communication plays an essential part in developing a positive organizational culture. Establishing communication channels help your teams collaborate more effectively and reach out to each other anytime they like. It significantly reduces organizational conflicts and encourages a sense of team building. Professional translation project management system also come with communication features that make it quite simple to enable seamless collaboration between internal and external project teams. It is important to have such tools in your localization system if you are dealing with a remote workforce.

Reduced Manual Workload

Overloading your employees with excessive work is never recommended because it will not just take a toll on their mental well-being but also reduce their effectiveness and performance. If you want the team to be productive and perform well at the same time, you must not do excessive work on them. If you think the workload is getting intense or maybe the current resources are not enough to manage things in time, you can always reach out to freelancers to manage your workload. This way, you can manage your workload more effectively without causing trouble to your localization team.

Easy Accessibility to Resources

Most localization tools are designed in a way that makes it much easier for your team to access different project resources from their account. All your team members can have access to project resources depending on their job roles and authorities. So, there is no need to get permission from authorities every time a team member wants to get access to project resources and documents.

It makes overall task management simpler and more agile for your teams. If you are a document translation services provider, you may have created glossaries for your translation project that you want to provide each translator working on that project. There is no need to send those glossaries separately to every translator, just provide them access to glossaries in your TMS. So, they can use them anytime without emails back and forth to get permission.

Monitoring Performances

Continuously accessing and improving the performances of the localization team is also a challenge for project managers. Through a localization management platform, you can monitor your team’s efficiency through in-build performance analytics. It will give you an idea about how well your team is working, and how productive they are in terms of meeting the deadlines.

Project managers can take timely actions if some employees are underperforming. They can listen to their concerns, and provide them assistance with their tasks. The purpose of monitoring your team’s performance is not about micromanaging the employees. It is more about being aware of what people need and helping you perform well through your full assistance.

Final Words!

The success and credibility of your localization project are highly dependent on the efficiency and productivity of your localization team. Using a professional tool indeed helps you manage your employees effectively and enhance their overall work efficiency and performance.