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How improving the visibility and control of your projects and resources helps increase the performance and efficiency of your business.
This article is aimed in particular at mid-sized companies, which the term “project management” can intimidate, even though their growth rests on developing products or services, and therefore on running projects. Here are fifteen best practices to grow more effectively through mastery of your projects. This selection draws on an article by Ian Needs, Business 2 Community.
- Improve project estimation: a consistent method for estimating resources and spend helps you understand each project’s impact on capacity and budgets, and standardize the client relationship.
- Understand true resource capacity: capacity planning lets you analyze the impact of projects in real time, better manage client expectations and reduce costs.
- Select and prioritize the right projects: ranking projects optimizes the use of critical resources and reduces the failure rate.
- Plan clearly and consistently: simple planning of tasks, roles and deliverables reduces risk and makes deadlines reliable.
- Optimize resource use: planning resources up front establishes feasibility and a realistic plan.
- Gain real-time visibility of deliverables: tracking deliverables lets you anticipate the benefits expected from each project.
- Improve budget and cost control: a project management tool creates and tracks budgets, comparing actual and forecast.
- Make delivery reliable with project tools: they help lead teams, decide on strategies and involve clients and leaders.
- Encourage team collaboration: a collaborative platform fosters innovation, problem-solving and the involvement of remote resources.
- Reduce project risks and failures: centralised risk management gives real-time visibility and improves on-time, on-budget delivery.
- Get a real-time picture of progress: continuous task updates give a clear, instant view of progress.
- Measure productivity, progress and utilisation: automating time and expense capture improves cost control and future estimation.
- Improve client satisfaction: faster handling of requests strengthens the relationship of trust.
- Improve cash flow and reduce billing errors: automating billing maximises revenue and limits errors.
- Improve reporting and analysis: automation cuts manual steps and errors and makes analysis more reliable.
Published by NetsFive.