You will certainly need some way of managing projects as your business grows. The term “Project Management” has somehow developed a bad reputation and has scared many SMEs. As a result, they end up implementing a host of unrelated and counter-productive tools. With the increasing prominence of technology being incorporated into business methodology, now is the time to design a better business model. In this article, we will tackle 15 great ways in which Project Management Software can help your growing business. Before we begin, we highly recommend you consult an I.T managed service to assist in integrating project management software into your business operations.
-
Improve the Project Estimation Process
There are many factors that contribute to the final outcome of the project. The top two are planning and estimation which are equally crucial to a long-term project’s success. Estimation is the most obvious yet commonly overlooked factor. Most businesses give little importance to estimation. They casually brush off the undeniable benefits it can provide to the business, its individuals, its project managers, and its executives. Through Project Estimation, all method of estimation and expenditure in the entire project’s run is consistent and standardized. By just having a simple form of Project Estimation, a project’s impact on resource capability can be easily understood. You can also easily determine its impact on your operating budgets. Project Estimation also sets a standard of the way your sales team and project managers interact with your customers and quote for work. This will relate to an overall positive impact on productivity, increased customer satisfaction, and timely delivery of projects that are within your company’s budget.
-
Gain a Better Understanding of Your True Resource Capability
Product-based or service-based businesses’ owe their success to Resource Capability Planning. With this, your business has the power to analyze the impact of delivering projects and services on resource capability in real time. This will enable you to better manage customer expectations, improve overall business productivity, exceed service level agreements while reducing costs. Even if you are a small business, resource capability planning is still vital. It provides clear and consistent visual representation of your “book of work” and how it will be delivered. Consequently, it will prove to be an essential tool for planning your growth.
-
Ensure You Select and Prioritize the Right Projects
If you are an organization independent on share and size of focus, then project prioritization is a must for you. It enables you to prioritize project related work against each other to define a sensible, optimized order of work. It is an essential process for any growing business. It enables you to make use of your scarcest resources to maximize benefit while removing project failures. It will also help you assess the potential return of your project investments versus the resource and expenditure demands and potential risk.
-
Plan Projects in a Clear and Consistent Manner
If you wish success on your current project and avoid water going down the drain, then give extra time for some careful planning. Project planning clearly lays out the tasks, activities, roles, responsibilities and deliverables required by each project. Planning eliminates disappointments. It helps reduce risks, provide exact timings and ensures that projects are delivered on time and within budget. Your team will require access to relevant information to their tasks, so make sure you have cloud computing enabled to protect the data and improve loading times.
-
Optimize Your Resource Usage
Another essential component is Resource Scheduling. This is where you establish the feasibility of your project plans and set realistic customer expectations. If resources are scheduled before a project commences, your project managers can easily assess the flexibility they have over the use of specific resources. They can also align tasks and work packages with resource availability. When resources are unavailable and delays are not an option, resource scheduling allows project managers to consider alternative approaches, trade-offs or the re-prioritization of work. If the business is less structured or has more volatile resourcing requirements, resource scheduling provides resource utilization levels. It also increases revenue by providing the ability to quickly assign the best fit available resource based on skills and other factors like experience and location. Businesses will efficiently fulfill resource requests and manage resource conflicts. For example, a modern project management system will implement vehicle GPS tracking in real-time to monitor where certain resources are, and if they are on schedule.
-
Increase Instant Visibility in the Status of Deliverables
Managing project deliverables is important for any organization whether independent of size or focus. This is most essential especially for small or growing businesses with less mature project management processes and with no formal process in place. Deliverables are the quantifiable results of a project. They can either be goods or services that are produced. Having quantifiable results is what sets deliverables different from milestones. This covers both tangible and intangible items. By managing your project deliverables, executives will gain real time visibility into the status of each deliverable. It also provides a clear overview of how the business will profit from each project. This is a colossal benefit from job management systems, the ability to maximize the effectiveness of your staff, ensuring they are always contributing. To stay afloat, you need to keep up with the innovation leaders of today and use technology to your advantage.
-
Improve Budgeting/Cost Control
When a company has little experience, the prospect of generating a project budget is daunting. But just like the preceding points, the project budget is an essential tool for measuring performance and progress of any project. This is where project management software is useful. It enables you to create project budgets directly from the project plans or from your project estimates. Project management software allows you to compare actual versus planned to ensure you have an accurate picture of your current budget and monitor it as well. It also gives you a snapshot of your future financial projections in real time.
