In our blog, we’ve always focused on the many different aspects that comprise a business and help make it successful.
Each of these elements, such as building a business plan or following a solid marketing strategy, is essential to your business’s thriving. However, if you put all of it to work separately from each other, the result is catastrophic.
For example, your business plan can never be effective enough if you keep shoveling budget money into a marketing activity that your cash flow cannot sustain. You need your accounting department to cooperate with the marketing team. While both are overseen continuously by the management responsible for the business plan implementation.
Therefore, every project your company sets out to complete has to be organized and planned in a way that allows all of the company’s departments to do their part without disrupting one another.
Project Management definition & methodology
A simple Project Management definition is this: Project Management is the scheduling and detailed organization of every single project a company has decided to take. Project Managers organize and plan every aspect of the projects to ensure they’re of high quality and completed on time.
Moreover, Project Managers decide when a project is not worth the company’s time and resources or is too much of a risk.
Project Management for Freelancers
Project Management for freelancers is organizing and planning in detail every project they take up on behalf of their customers.
Freelancers know this all too well; a customer can be demanding, impatient, and sometimes may change their mind in the middle of an ongoing project. In our “Tips on managing your freelancing project’s scope” article, we discuss how Project Management can help you avoid “scope creeping” from your customers.
Why Use Project Management
This article’s topic is about all the Project Management benefits, especially in terms of better organization and increased growth for your business.
Most people tend to think that Project Management is just another overhead their business needs to get rid of. This notion is most prominent in the business sector and among new entrepreneurs that aren’t practically familiar with the concept.
However, Project Management can bring much more to your firm than needless paperwork and rigid procedures. Let’s dive into this!
7 Project Management Benefits
#1 Increased organization
You may view Project Management as your business’s compass. Projects are inherently messy and chaotic. So much so that managing them is a challenge. Good Project Management can work miracles with your company’s organization and planning.
By setting a standard set of procedures that everyone in the company can follow, you sort out the chaos for good!
One of the most important advantages of Project Management is that it streamlines every aspect of a business and actually does away with unnecessary tasks.
#2 Enhanced employee productivity
So, having set the procedures begs the following question: “How do I manage a project team effectively?”. First, you determine which projects are worth pursuing and how, for maximum profitability. This way, your staff can perform better towards their goals. Relieved from the burden of needless overhead, your employees know exactly what to do to complete a project timely. Trusting the process is essential for increased focus and productivity!
Project Management creates efficient templates and procedures. Hence, it can be the point of reference when someone needs to readjust their workflow.
#3 Increased preparedness
When you have efficient Project Management in place, it is easier to avoid mistakes or confusion due to sudden changes in scope.
Through proper planning of processes, a Project Manager is able to work out all the possible scenarios and provide workarounds when necessary.
When a process is working, you can use it many times over for similar cases. This way, the Project Manager doesn’t have to constantly reinvent solutions. And employees are less likely to get sidetracked by difficult situations.
#4 Better pricing policies
When you’re aware of how much time it takes to complete a task, you can have a pretty accurate estimation of the whole project’s time-requirement. Thus, its cost. This is one of the reasons why Time Tracking is a growing concept these days. It can absolutely change the way you manage and overview your projects, while it helps you get paid for every minute of your work. As we’ve previously mentioned in our “Top – 10 Effective Time Management Tips and Strategies for your Work” piece, “Time is money”!
Coming up with new processes through good Project Management will help you optimally tweak both your budget and pricing policy towards more profitable margins!
#5 Schedule time more effectively and keep deadlines
When a clear roadmap is laid for everyone to follow, sticking to deadlines is far easier.
Project Management employs time-schedule and to-do lists that will enable every company member to make better use of their time.
Remember that good Project Management for freelancers and businesses alike is ultimately what makes the difference between a happy or a dissatisfied client.
#6 Evaluation tool
Processes and standard procedures are not written in stone. The purpose of Project Management should be to look for improvement space.
Use your Project Management tools to evaluate the efficiency of current methods and figure out ways to optimize them!
Projects, apart from monetary rewards, bring knowledge as well (or at least they should); a know-how that, if evolved, can arm your company with one more competitive advantage.
#7 Easier to adapt to changes
If you want to know how to manage a project effectively, you must know that nothing is constant.
The only thing that remains the same is change, and that’s what Project Management does ultimately; manage change!
Effective project management comes up with effective workarounds to problems that might occur. Or sets up proactive procedures to identify and predict risky situations before they even start.
The first step to take to reap the above Project Management benefits is to understand the Project Management definition. The second step is to accept it as an essential element for a successful business and work hard to achieve it.
All projects consist of various combinations of processes and templated procedures. If you find yourself in a chaotic situation, Project Management will navigate you safely out of the mess.
How to manage projects effectively
On the whole, in this article, we have explored the Project Management definition and benefits. If you want to find out what the steps for successful Project Management are, stay tuned! Or, if you want to check out statistics around Project Management, feel free to check out the ones that the Hive has gathered.
Our next article will give you everything you need to know about how to implement and utilize Project Management for your small business’s growth!
