11 Ways Project Management Helps Business Scale

Businesses that deal with delivering products or services need a definite system in making their investments grow. Therefore, an acute sense of clarity in managing all commercial aspects reigns supreme. This sometimes becomes difficult as several SMEs are simply petrified of using the term Project Management (PM). The fear for the term is so great that a lot of times a host of non-connected, counter-productive tools are often used in order to avoid project management tools. Marrying technology with daily life being the order of the day; here are several ways businesses can be integrated with Project Management for effective results.

Ways to Integrate Businesses with Project Management

  1. Improve the Project Estimation Process:

    Copious factors influence the final outcome of a project. Upfront planning and estimation are two of the most crucial determinants for long-term project success. Several businesses that have so far failed to implement any form of estimation have been deprived of the truckloads of benefits that the software provides. It is no wonder then, that businesses, individuals, project managers, and executives, and the satisfaction of their customers dips greatly. Project Estimation is a process that can provide you with consistent estimations of your project resourcing levels. It can also control the overall business expenditure. A simple implementation of the software can throw up options that clarify a project’s impact on resource capability. It can also have a positive result on your operating budgets. While technology also helps one standardize the way sales teams and project managers interact with customers and quote for work; the Project Estimation process has an overall encouraging impact on the following:

    • Productivity,
    • Customer satisfaction and
    • The number of projects which you deliver on time.

  1. Better Understanding of your True Resource Capability:

    Close to the heels of project estimation is Resource Capability Planning (RCP). One of the key success factors for any business which delivers projects or services, RCP empowers your business with a roadmap with timelines. You can analyze the impact of delivering projects and services on resource capability in real-time, enabling you to:

    • Better manage customer expectations,
    • Improve overall business productivity,
    • Exceed customer service level agreements and
    • Reduce costs.

  1. Select and Prioritize the Right Projects:

    This process is beneficial to any organization independent of shape, size, or focus. Prioritization enables you to prioritize project-related work against each other for structuring the body of work. An essential focal point for any growing business, seen with maximum benefits obtained from one’s scarcest resources while removing project failures. In any project, minimizing or eliminating challenges such as these is pivotal to the success of the project. Selection and prioritization can assure the quick and easy return of project investments vis-à-vis the risks, resources,s and expenditure demands.

  2. Optimize your Resource Usage:

    The successful delivery of a project amidst other things includes planning and allocation of resources. This usually occurs before the project commences. While Project Planning provides a simple, easy method to help your business effectively plan the tasks, activities, roles, responsibilities, and deliverables required by each project; Resource Scheduling, (RS) another important bolt in any successful project is equally important. RS establishes the feasibility of your project plans and for setting realistic customer expectations. By scheduling resources before projects commence, your project managers will be able to assess the flexibility they have over the use of specific resources, align tasks and work packages with resource availability, and where resources are unavailable and delays are not an option, project managers can consider alternative approaches, trade-offs or the re-prioritization of work. For businesses with less structured or more volatile resourcing requirements, resource scheduling provides the ability to optimize resource utilization levels and increase revenue by providing the ability to quickly assign the best fit available resources based on skills, experience, and location, to efficiently fulfill resource requests and to manage out resource conflicts.

  3. Real-Time Visibility in the Status of Deliverables:

    Effectively managing project deliverables is important for any organization, independent of size or focus. In fact, this is especially important for small or growing businesses with less mature project management processes. This is largely true for companies where there is no formal process of defining business cases or the benefits associated with each project. Each deliverable maps to a different project milestone, which simply means that they represent the quantifiable goods or services produced as the result of a project. Whether tangible or intangible, by managing project deliverables, executives will gain real-time visibility into the status of each deliverable and a clear overview of how the business will profit or benefit from each project.

  4. Improve Budgeting or Cost Control:

    For many businesses, the prospect of generating a project budget is daunting, especially if little project management experience exists. This is an essential tool for measuring the performance and progress of any project. The efficacy of the project management software is displayed here, as the software enables you to create project budgets directly from project plans or from your project estimates. Additionally, project management software will ensure you can monitor the budget, as against the actually planned one, ensuring that there lies an accurate picture of both, the current budget along with future financial projections in real-time.

  5. Improve Product and Service Delivery:

    Every business requires an effective toolkit to successfully manage the delivery of the products or services they deliver. Project management software provides project managers with the tools required to lead their teams and implement an effective strategy for delivering the goods. Clients largely benefit from the knowledge that their input has a direct effect on the project delivery process. Moreover, employees also rake in the benefits from a clear understanding of their stake in the project and their role in its delivery. The beauty of managing projects in a fully integrated solution is its flexibility; once the smarter direction has been discovered, project management tools provide the flexibility to take it a few notches higher.

  6. Encourage and Facilitate Team Collaboration:

    Throughout humanity, people have historically recognized that working together can accomplish more. However, many businesses ignore this fact and continually allow individuals to pursue their own objectives, loosely tied to project or organizational objectives. A Project Collaboration software eliminates this, by providing businesses with an ideal platform encouraging your project teams to work in synergy and share knowledge throughout the project management process. The software equips each team member to make their individual contribution towards a common goal. Some key factors achieved are:

    • Greater innovation
    • Better problem solving
    • Greater project delivery efficiency and
    • Reduction in the cost and impact of absent resources.

  1. Real-Time Picture of Project Progress:

    Accuracy in project tracking ensures success within any project. While this is not only a huge challenge for many businesses, it ranks as the most essential thing on the to-do list for any project. Project management software is slated to provide any business with a standard and repeatable method of capturing project progress and reporting status. From the end users updating the percent completion of their tasks, through to project managers carrying out a full project review and submitting a fully auditable project status report; the project management software provides a simple toolkit that ensures that all project stakeholders have a clear, consistent, real-time view of project progress and status.

  2. Improve Customer Response Rates and Satisfaction:

    Businesses best benefitted when the software that they have put in place can deliver repeats all the time. The project management software enables businesses to respond to customer issues and queries in a more timely, productive, and effective manner, thereby increasing customer satisfaction in forging a relationship as a valued supplier. Additionally, employees will work in a far more structured manner, saving time and ensuring each customer receives the level of care your SLA demand. Quite simply, by improving Issue Management, businesses benefit greatly from an increased volume of happy customers, which directly affects the bottom line in the form of increased profits for your business.

  3. Improve Cash flow and Reduce Billing Errors:

    Several project management solutions offer the functionality to fully automate the billing of products and services. With time, the billing software can be easily improved upon maximizing revenue and reducing billing errors. The billing functionality should operate in a manner that enables most of the processes to be automated, inclusive of the automation of the most basic billing types such as time and material. While this is true, the software should also be able to easily implement more complex billing requirements such as fixed price, milestone, capped, and repeat billing.

Whatever the stage of the business in its evolution, marrying technology with business using the various processes of Project Management can bring about a sea change in implementing or upgrading the existing project management system.

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Lucy Brown
Lucy Brown has many years of experience in the project management domain and has helped many organizations across the Asia Pacific region. Her excellent coordinating capabilities, both inside and outside the organization, ensures that all projects are completed on time, adhering to clients' requirements. She possesses extensive expertise in developing project scope, objectives, and coordinating efforts with other teams in completing a project. As a project management practitioner, she also possesses domain proficiency in Project Management best practices in PMP and Change Management. Lucy is involved in creating a robust project plan and keep tabs on the project throughout its lifecycle. She provides unmatched value and customized services to clients and has helped them to achieve tremendous ROI.

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