Growing a small enterprise into a larger company requires takes a lot of work. Avoid wasting precious time. And actually turn the corner. But to do this business owners need drive, discipline, and a structured approach. All this points to having good project management.
Project management remains the smart, efficient and effective way for small businesses to get things done. But it requires following a process. And you must apply knowledge, skills and experience to achieve a clearly defined goal.
You need a proper plan in place. Or projects get derailed. And team members lose sight of the end goal. They waste valuable time. And your business incurs additional, unnecessary costs. Don’t lose site of your objective. Or you run the risk of leaving your team floundering and disgruntled. Done effectively, project management helps your small business stay on schedule. It helps you keep an eye on financial resources. And it enables effective evaluation of successes and failures.
How to Improve Project Management
Keep your team on the right track for successfully launching and executing a project. Follow these four tips to improve project management at your company.
Establish a Project’s Purpose, Scope, and Goal
First, don’t make the mistake of attempting to tackle every issue in one swoop. Try to take on everything at once and very little gets accomplished.
Successful project management involves identifying a specific issue to tackle. And then you determine how that individual issue will be addressed. Gathering the team and resources to work on it. And then put that plan into action.
If completing one particular project happens to trigger an idea for another project, be sure not to fall into the trap of adding the new project to your existing one. Instead, keep each project narrowed and focused. For example, a logo update may inspire the update or creation of new collateral materials. Move forward in completing the logo update project and then reserve the collateral materials update for a completely different project.
Set Firm Time Frames and Budgets for Each Project Step
Creating a clear focus for a project helps tremendously with determining how much time a project will take to accomplish and how much of an investment will be required for it. There should be an overall budget and schedule for the entire project itself in addition to a detailed accounting of what materials, labor hours and equipment will be needed for individual tasks within the project.
Knowing and understanding such details will keep spending in check. It will also allow your team to understand which tasks will need to be accomplished chronologically, simultaneously or at any time within the project timeline.
To make sure everyone is on the same page regarding time frames, budgets and other project details, be sure to put the next step into action.
Keep Your Team Connected and Informed
Once you set your project in motion, the most integral aspect of project management is keeping your team members abreast of all information, task assignments, status updates, and scheduling. Making sure every team member is on the same page will prevent progression bottlenecks, task redundancy, confusion, and disorganization.
A great way to keep your team coordinated is to use a cloud-based collaborative project management tool such as MeisterTask. As MeisterTask updates in real time, this tool enables team members to share up-to-the-minute ideas and plans and convert those ideas and plans into specific tasks. In this way, each team member will know who is accountable for what action step.
Other useful tools are Idea Drop, which is a mobile app that allows teams to share concepts, and CodePen, which empowers front-end developers to give and receive feedback during a website design.
Perform a Post-Project Assessment
Once your project is said and done, review the end results to determine whether or not your goal was indeed accomplished. While reviewing project outcomes, take a look at whether or not the project progressed according to plan or if any deviations were necessary. Go over your budget outcomes and note whether or not your costs matched your planned expenditures. Assess whether or not you were able to work within your scheduling boundaries.
Doing an end-of-project review will help you better understand what elements contributed to your success or hindered achievement in any way. You’ll also know what adjustments you should make to improve upon your processes for future projects.
Benefit When You Improve Project Management
Employing proper project management skills is all about making sure your goals and objectives come to fruition without risking excess time and money to achieve them. When you take the time to formulate a project plan, and then work that plan, you’re setting yourself up to operate at an improved capacity for bigger, better projects—and that’s a huge part of how a small outfit can grow into a bigger and better company.
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