Project management has become an essential tool in the modern office environment. It helps businesses streamline their operations and deliver products and services faster than ever before. However, many hidden benefits of being a business owner don’t come from the work itself. That’s why many business owners turn to project management as an extra outlet for productivity. It’s not as difficult as you may think, and it can positively impact your business in several other ways. Keep reading to discover more about why you should consider getting started with project management for your business.
What are the lesser-known benefits of Project management for business?
1. Improving the quality of project delivery
The quality of project delivery is the extent to which the end solution fulfills or surpasses the expectations of all stakeholders. Examples of quality include whether the solution meets all requirements, if it’s delivered on time and within budget, or if any risk areas have been identified and resolved.
Project management can help improve the quality of project delivery by providing a structured approach to managing the project and its associated processes. For example, identifying and assessing risks that could affect the project at an early stage will help manage their impact should they occur. Identifying issues with specific tasks in advance will also allow time for corrective actions before they escalate into major problems. The ability to correctly identify such issues and risks is a skill that many managers are not immediately familiar with, as it’s not typically taught in business schools. Still, many training programs are available from accredited organizations such as APM that teach these skills. Improving the quality of projects will lead to happier employees and clients, higher morale throughout your organization, improved business reputation, and ultimately increased revenue opportunities!
2. Optimizing costs and meeting budgets
From the first planning stages, project management can help you determine which resources are needed to complete the job. This information is critical when deciding how much money should be spent on team members, office space, computers, and other equipment. Project managers can work with you to manage your budget for your project. Some projects require a fixed budget, meaning that a business cannot go over its budget no matter what happens. Other projects allow for limited flexibility in the case of unexpected expenses or cost overruns called contingencies. An effective project manager will help ensure that your company’s costs stay within their means.
3. Improving communication with all stakeholders
Keeping all stakeholders informed and involved is a key responsibility of the project manager. It has many benefits, such as avoiding conflicts around requirements (see the previous section), ensuring the team gets all the help it needs to succeed, and preventing surprises.
First, create a stakeholder management plan that will help you keep track of your stakeholders, who they are, and their respective interests. Then use various tools, such as stakeholder analysis charts, project status reports shared regularly with all stakeholders, and formal communication plans indicating how communications will occur during different project phases.
4. Minimizing the impact of risk on projects
It may come as a surprise that good project management can help minimize the impact of risk on projects.
What is risk management? It’s about identifying, assessing, and mitigating risks — for example, by reducing their likelihood or by reducing the impact of their occurrence. The key here is to be proactive before anything goes wrong rather than trying to react when something has already happened.
5. Improving team performance through better management of people
Project management is widely recognized as a system of methods and tools for delivering projects to time, cost, and quality requirements. The benefits of project management are well documented, but what about the broader benefits for businesses?
Here we examine some of the additional benefits that project management can have on a business’s success by improving team performance through better management of people within your business.
If you are considering increasing your uptake in project work, these additional benefits will help you decide whether or not this is the right decision for your company.
6. Gaining greater visibility of project progress and performance
You can use KPIs to track key business initiatives, and you can use them to track your project progress and performance just as well.
In a business, you’ll want to be tracking the following:
Milestones
how many were achieved and how many weren’t
Project health
how many initiatives are behind schedule, over budget, or at risk of failing
Project status
number of tasks completed, number incomplete, number in progress, etc.
Project forecast
what do we think will happen during the year? Will all our projects be successful? Do we need to invest more resources into some projects?
Project budget
did we stay within our planned budget or not? Is there a chance we’ll go over? What should we be doing about it?
Project risks
did any risks materialize that could have a negative impact on our project success rate or total project costs? Did we avoid any potential problems by avoiding certain risks? What should be done about those that remain active threats to our success rate or costs?
7. Increasing customer satisfaction thorugh improved communication and control
Customer satisfaction is the key to your brand’s reputation. But how do you provide a high level of customer service?
Some of the key elements of excellent customer service include:
- fast response times
- convenience and accessibility – especially online access to your services or products
- Personalization through careful record-keeping and data collection. Customers want to know that they’ve been heard and acknowledged as a person, not just a number in an order book.
With easy-to-access project management software in one central location, you can keep track of all inquiries, orders, complaints, etc. Having the records readily available will help you respond quickly to problems or questions. For example, if you run into an error on your website that affects user navigation, you can create a task to fix it with proper urgency. If someone contacts you about receiving their order late–you can check with shipping to get back to them promptly and make things right.
8. Learning from past projects to improve future projects
Another unknown benefit of project management is learning from past projects to improve future projects. Good project management is based on learning from the past. Learning from past projects it’s not just a matter of reflecting on what went well and what didn’t go well. Instead, you need to delve deeper by trying to understand why something worked or didn’t work. A suggested approach for learning from past projects includes:
9. Increasing your competitive edge through improved business performance
How can project management help your business? One of the most significant advantages of implementing project management in your business is that it will lead to improvement in the performance of your business.
Due to the principles of good project management and the application of proven techniques, you will be more likely to deliver projects on time, within budget, and with high levels of quality. This means that you are more likely to meet your business objectives and increase your competitive edge.
10. Providing clear leadership and direction to your project teams
As a project manager, you are tasked with providing clear leadership and direction to your project teams. This can be challenging at times, especially if the team members are not in the same location or even time zone. Time differences further complicate matters as some team members may be working when others are sleeping and vice versa. In such cases, it is essential to provide clear instructions without ambiguity; this will help avoid misunderstandings and allow the members to work together seamlessly.
11. Creating a framework for the successful delivery of key business objectives
The final benefit of project management that is rarely discussed is delivering a framework for the successful delivery of key business objectives.
If you’re serious about delivering your business objectives, you will need to consider how these are planned and managed. After all, there’s no point in setting an objective if you aren’t going to put a plan to deliver it!
A framework would include:
- What are the objectives?
- How will they be measured?
- Who within the team needs to be involved?
- What resources do we need to make this happen?
So, if you want your business objectives delivered on time, within budget, and with quality, then start thinking about how you intend to manage them; don’t just leave it up to chance.
12. Improving the performance of your team members and empowering them to do their job well
By identifying the tasks that need to be done, who will do them, and when they will be done, you provide your team members with a framework that helps them perform well and improves their chances of success on projects.
It clarifies what needs to be achieved at each stage of the project and gives team members a clear understanding of what they have to do. It also helps them work together more efficiently.
Project management creates more opportunities for team members to get feedback about their performance through regular catch-ups and discussions about how things are going. This can help them improve their performance over time as well as get better at working with other people in general (something that could come in handy if they ever decide to change jobs).
Conclusion
Research shows that good project management increases the chances of a successful project by almost 90 percent. In fact, according to the Project Management Institute’s 2014 Pulse of the Profession study, organizations that use project management practices spend 21 percent less on projects than those that do not.
A good project manager is like the glue that holds a team together. With clear communication, scope definition, and an understanding of each team member’s strengths, a project manager can foster collaboration and keep everyone focused on achieving results.
Project management takes the guesswork out of planning. For instance, a feature called “task dependency” lets you schedule tasks based on whether they are dependent or independent — meaning you can start certain tasks only when other tasks have been completed or are in progress. This helps improve productivity because people aren’t working on overlapping tasks or waiting for another task to be finished before beginning their own work.
People are more engaged when involved in the planning process and understand what is expected of them without being micromanaged; effective tools make this possible. By creating clear timelines and identifying who is responsible for each task, teams know what needs to be done and how long it should take to complete it, focusing on results instead of structure or administration.