Why Project Management Is Critical for Business Profitability

Introduction

Managing a project is a multifaceted process that requires planning, scheduling, reporting, and tracking. Gaps in communication, resource allocation, or backup plan can affect project progress and business profitability. This article sheds light on the importance of project management and the pivotal role it plays in ensuring business profitability.

What Is Project Management?

Project management is the application of certain techniques, skills, and tools to achieve the final goal of the project. It involves planning and organizing the project to produce the desired outcome within the stipulated timeframe. The project management lifecycle consists of four rudimentary stages: initiation, planning, execution, and closure.

Over the past decade, project management has evolved through several stages. The evolution was driven by the need to deliver the project more quickly and efficiently. Most managers have switched from emails and spreadsheets to project management software. To ensure smooth project flow, it’s necessary to meet future contingencies that could derail the project.

Top Reasons Why Project Management Is Critical for Business Profitability

●       Clear Objective to Improve Competence

Setting clear objectives and a realistic timeline is the first step towards project success. By breaking the project into smaller tasks and prioritizing them appropriately, the team gains clarity about what needs to be done. If the objective is ambiguous, the project is more likely to see scope creep, missed deadlines, and, eventually, cost overrun. In the absence of project management and defined goals, the teams may misplace project priorities, causing missed deadlines and budget leaks.

●       Better Project Planning Helps Staying Top of the Deliverables

Project management requires allocating resources in the best possible ways. With proper utilization of budget and resources, you are more likely to complete the project in time. On the other hand, in the absence of a proper plan, you may risk wasting resources and time.

It’s better that the project manager discusses the budget, timeline, and objectives with stakeholders and clients. Together, they can outline a roadmap by keeping all aspects in mind.

Project planning involves assigning responsibilities to team members, streamlining workflow, and gearing up with a backup strategy. This way, the project completion strategy can be re-assessed and re-aligned in the event of any contingency,

●       Project Management Ensures Alignment of Project with Business Strategy

Often, organizations overlook how the project aligns with the business strategies. Effective project management not only navigates the planning and execution of the project but also ensures that all the tasks and goals of the project resonate with the organization’s strategy, vision, and objective. This alignment also keeps the project manager and the stakeholders on the same page, ensuring frictionless collaboration across the team.

●       Keeping Deliverable Quality in Check

As teams rush towards meeting project deadlines, it’s possible for quality standards to suffer.

Since quality is critical for client satisfaction and the organization’s brand reputation, project management needs to play a key role in ensuring quality at all stages of the project.

To sum up, project management not only completes a project on time but also ensures that the quality of the output is assessed periodically.

●       Right Project Management Methodology Step up the Game

Regardless of the level of project complexity, proper planning and execution are indispensable for project success. The organization must consider aspects like team dependencies, the team size, the project timeframe, resource allocation, contingency likelihood, and the request frequency from stakeholders.

Project management methodologies facilitate proper project planning to address all such issues. These methodologies are the set of rules that guide how to plan, execute and manage the project. There are many methodologies, and each comes with its own paradigm. After assessing, the project manager can select and implement a method that suits the project requirements. In short, implementing the right project management methodology can improve the team's competence, thereby ensuring project success.

●       Project Management Save Time and Resources

One of the top concerns for any business is to accomplish the project within the stipulated time and budget. This is where well-organized project management and planning comes in. It helps allocate the right resources on the right task that preempts resource wastage, missed deadlines, and cost overruns. Effective project planning helps you analyze the project journey, spending, resource utilization, bottlenecks, deadlines, etc. Armed with this data, one can evaluate how achievable the deadlines are and re-shape the project journey to ensure seamless execution.

●       Better Decision Making with Project Management

When the project manager has clear visibility into the project's progress, they can effortlessly make smart decisions that benefit the project. Project management provides insight into who is working on which task, where the resources are being spent, what the priorities are, and whether the project is on track. Equipped with this knowledge, businesses can make the right decisions to optimize the project workflow and mitigate the bottlenecks before they aggravate.

Conclusion: Project management streamlines the project flow and facilitates goal attainment in time, thereby ensuring the project’s success. This, in turn, enables organizations to achieve business profitability.

Author Bio: Sonika Malviya works as a content writer at Replicon and loves to write about technology trends.

8 Essential Skills Every Project Manager Needs

While the complexity of project management is daunting, it also offers many benefits to your business. By delegating responsibility and goals to a team, you can ensure long-term success with higher quality results at a reduced cost.

When faced with an overwhelming task like launching a new product or improving processes in every department for increased efficiency, all that needs to be done is to overwhelm most managers. To perform the project manager duties successfully, you must enhance your skills and work more efficiently.

Project management skills are essential to project managers because they have so many roles that need to be taken care of. For example, they must know how to manage budgets, project schedules, and project risks for a project to succeed. In addition, project managers also need the skills necessary for leadership, such as conflict resolution, decision-making, and communication. In this blog post, we will go over eight essential skills every project manager needs.

Essential Skills for a Project Manager

Every project manager needs to have several skills to be successful and achieve the project goals. The project manager's responsibilities may vary from task management, time-management, budgeting or risk assessment. Your interest and skills will answer the question why choose a project management career.

Some of the essential skills for a project manager include:

1. Effective Leadership skills
2. Communication skills
3. Organization skills
4. Negotiation skills
5. Adaptability skills
6. Risk Management
7. Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
8. Patience 

1. Effective Leadership skills

Project management is all about how you motivate your team and see the project to completion. You're leading a group of people, which means making sure they stay on track so that you can achieve success. Project leadership comes in different styles, and one might work better for you than another, depending on the personality.

As a team leader, you must bring in excellent results from all the team members involved in a project. Thus, project management is about more than just the allocation and organization of quantifiable resources.

Project Management is also about building relationships with people. Project managers understand how to get the best out of their team members to achieve that big goal: to see a project through completion.

2. Communication skills

A project manager must be able to communicate efficiently for their operation and team members to succeed. Of course, listening will help them understand what needs improvement, but conveying instructions is the most critical role of all, with success or failure.

Clear communication is one of the most critical aspects of leadership. It helps to lead a team effectively because it allows you to articulate what needs to be done and how your project can succeed. Clear communication also ensures that stakeholders, vendors, contractors, etc., are all on board with where the work will go.

3. Organization skills

Being a competent project manager can be a challenge when you handle multiple facets of a project. Organization and delegation skills are essential to ensure the delivery of an accurate, timely product or service.

While managing a project, it is essential to keep organized and on top of every task. An excellent way for managers to do this would be by creating documents outlining all the jobs they have been assigned. It will help them stay in control and prevent last-minute mishaps that might arise from not being prepared. As a project manager, if you cannot manage your schedule effectively, it reflects poorly on the team.

4. Negotiation skills

Negotiation is not just about haggling, and bargaining with vendors to get a better price or managing deadlines. It can also be about conflict resolution between two parties that are equally vital to the success of your project. Negotiation skill is comprehended with your mastery of communication.

The art of negotiation is an invaluable skill for project managers to possess because it allows them to negotiate the terms with clients, stakeholders and other allies, which could save their company a lot of money. Although this requires practical experience before one can be effective at negotiating tactics, it would benefit any new or aspiring project manager if they could familiarize themselves with what has proven successful in past negotiations. Managers can carry out already mapped out strategies without having to waste time experimenting.

5. Adaptability skills

People in managerial positions determine how well their departments will adapt to such challenges. Even if situations get chaotic and out of hand, they must tackle them with a calm and optimistic approach to not let the organization fall apart.

Changes in industry standards are common, and they can result from many adaptations. For example, it could be the emergence of new technologies, strengthening market trends, or changing user demands.

The ability to adjust and change course during a project is one of the most essential skills of project leaders. Instead of starting from scratch when problems arise or changes need to be made, decide what is best for that situation, not hurting other parts of the plan.

6. Risk Management

There are risks inherent in any task, plan, or project. It is your job as a professional to identify them before they become problems. You must have the skill to identify, assess, and control risk.

Risk management is about being flexible and accommodating quickly to any shift in circumstances. You can put countless warnings and plans in place, but you will always suspect unforeseen factors. In addition, it means that as the primary person responsible for ensuring everything runs smoothly. It may be necessary for the project managers to readjust their thinking while monitoring team members, progress reports, and other input sources.

7. Critical Thinking and Problem Solving

Critical Thinking is simply analyzing and evaluating an issue or situation so that you can form an unbiased judgement. It prevents acting on rage, emotions or a received answer. Project managers must be able to use critical thinking skills to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of a situation and plan strategies accordingly.

It also required them to know how their analytical abilities can forecast the results of any strategy they come up with. Both convergent and divergent thinking is required when developing strategies.

8. Patience

A project manager is somebody with the ability to reorganize tasks as needed, stay on top of deadlines without getting stressed out, and keep a cool head even when they're presented with a lot of work. Patience is a virtue, along with which humor goes alongside. It helps project managers ease tensions and create a tone and culture in the workplace.

To Sum Up

Project managers are responsible for overseeing and coordinating the activities of a project from start to finish. Therefore, they need polished skills to ensure that critical deadlines are met without sacrificing quality or accuracy. Furthermore, managing multiple projects at once can be challenging, so having good multitasking abilities is also essential. Through online courses, you can utilize The Tips for PMP Exams to pass the test successfully and pursue a career in project management.

Author Bio: Viswanathan G is a Professional IT trainer with extensive experience in training and project management. By academics, he is a Mechanical Engineer and also developed his skills in programming. His 25 years of teaching experience have brought in thousands of students across the world. He is an expert in designing training courses with technical content and real-time examples. He is now working as a trainer in Edoxi Training Institute.

 

8 Project Management Schedule Compression Techniques

Project managers are pressured to deliver projects quickly. Sponsors think their project managers are magicians. And in a way, they are. 

Delays can occur to a project due to various reasons, but some common reasons are below:

• Unavailability of resources – This is one of the major reasons and the higher management also has a play in this.
• Risks – Improper management of known risks, and Occurrence of unknown risks.
• Unrealistic schedule
• Force Majeure – It is a common contractual clause that frees parties, bound by a contract, from liability or obligation if an “Act of God” happens.
• Pressure from higher management for new business opportunities – This happens when the higher management sees the possibility of getting a new business or project if you can complete this project early.
• Need to launch the product early – this can happen when a competitor launches a rival product and you can’t afford to lose the market.
• etc…

Projects are often delayed and there are various reasons for that. In such cases you need to compress the project schedule duration in order to bring the project back on track. In simple words, project schedule compression is reducing the duration of a project schedule, without compromising on the work that needs to be done in that schedule.

Let’s look at some ways to compress the schedule. 

• Recheck the activity dependencies. Make sure they are correct and valid. Additionally, look for ways to change the dependencies to drive faster completion.
• Challenge the assumptions about mandatory dependencies. Do we really have to complete certain activities BEFORE we start the successor activities? Sometimes we can find ways to start subsequent activities in parallel with other activities (called fast tracking). Warning – this action will likely increase risks.
• Reduce lags. Be creative and find ways to reduce the lags in the project’s critical path. 
• Check the external dependencies. Rather waiting two weeks for a delivery of laptops, why not drive across town and purchase the laptops locally? Furthermore, double-check the outsourcing assumptions and arrangements.
• Reduce the duration of activities by reducing the associated risks. When individuals estimate schedule activities, they add time to account for risks. Consequently, if we can reduce or eliminate the risk, we can reduce the time required.
• Reduce the project duration by adding additional qualified resources to the critical path activities (called crashing). Warning – this action increases cost and often increases risks.
• Reduce the duration by replacing a team member with someone with greater skill and knowledge for critical path activities. Of course, this action will likely increase the cost.
• Reduce the scope of the project. Discuss the priority of the deliverables with the key stakeholders and determine if the scope can be reduced.

Effective compression of a project schedule requires efficient planning management. An intelligent decision-making process based on the best scenario generated by testing various options.

Unfortunately, program compression is a fact in most projects.

The challenge faced by project managers is to keep the “compressed program” realistic and achievable.

Obeya: The Lean War Room

Successful projects don’t just happen; they require hard work and collaboration from both project managers and team members to ensure all tasks are completed and goals are met, on time and on budget. However, many projects ultimately fail or are abandoned because the team does not work together to achieve shared goals. Much like how two people in a canoe won’t get anywhere if they’re rowing in opposite directions, projects will be doomed to fail if all members are not working towards the same end product.

To avoid this unfortunate fate, project managers can find help with visual management and the Obeya room. Visual Management is a Lean best practice used to inform and involve anyone in the process (even those who are unfamiliar with the details), and quickly allow them to see what is going on so that everyone ultimately understands what is under control and what is not. A key element of Visual Management is Obeya.

Toyota first created Obeya rooms during production of the Prius in the 1990s. Since then, organizations across many industries have put the concept into action. Obeya, which means “large room” in Japanese, involves bringing together departmental leaders to focus on big picture issues involved with a single project or initiative.

Creating an Obeya room is akin to creating a “war room,” a command center that draws together leaders from across departments in an organization. While most often associated with product development, Obeya also is useful as the command center for managing a new business strategy, software development, project management and workflow management. Obeya helps you to generate ideas, collaborate with management and stakeholders, and gain a full overview of the projects and any problems that need to be resolved.

An Obeya is not a process island. Simply putting all of your engineers in a single, big room does not an Obeya make. By the same token, a glass-walled room studded with monitors displaying and rotating real-time data every 30 seconds also doesn't qualify as an Obeya if it isn't used routinely to collaborate and manage the business. While the room may be visually eye-catching, that may be all it is.

The idea behind an Obeya is to break down the barriers that prevent employees from collaborating and sharing information to make efficient decisions. Obeyas are most effective when established and outfitted to solve singular problems or work on specific projects.

Obeya rooms are a process management tool that fuels creativity and collaboration between decision-makers on all levels while developing problem-solving skills. An Obeya promotes quicker, more nimble problem-solving by speeding up the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) process.

Here’s a breakdown of the PDCA cycle:

·        Plan: Define a problem and develop potential solutions.

·        Do: Implement a proposed solution.

·        Check: Evaluate the results to see whether a solution is working.

·        Act: Take one of two actions: return to the planning step if the results aren’t satisfactory, or standardize the solution if the results are sufficient.

Rather than communicating across departments over the course of days or weeks, an Obeya brings together key decision-makers to implement the PDCA cycle and develop solutions quickly.

One of the most essential components of a successful Obeya room is choosing what will be visually represented in the room. Obeya rooms rely on visual management to spur collaboration and it is important that only relevant and important information is posted in order to keep the focus. For instance, posting customer complaints will keep managers focused on meeting customer requirements and their satisfaction. Other information that can be used in an Obeya are A3 reports, KPI’s, and the results of previous projects. The documents posted in an Obeya room should be clear and easy to understand, set up in a logical manner. It should flow from one side to the other and tell a complete story.

Visibility of information, transparency that applies to all relevant information, and visual organization are important quality attributes. When you walk into a well-equipped Obeya with your team, you would like to have easy access to everything you need. Information should be clear so that there are no misunderstandings. Then you are adequately enabled to identify improvements, make decisions and take action.

But this is just the foundational layer. First and foremost, it’s about the people. Nothing happens with all that neatly collected information if there are no people around willing to commit to each other and use the given platform to take action in pursuit of process improvement.

The Obeya connects information to people and therefore people to each other. By applying a repeatable rhythm and fixed structure, people in the Obeya meet other experts in their own field. All that expertise is needed to realize the strategic intention of the organization. Team members evaluate the status of their work and assess whether they are on schedule. Barriers can be discussed. Managers assess where resources can be deployed and see, at a glance, what that could mean for other initiatives.

Accountability is further supported through frequent “daily” reviews, which highlight responsibilities involved in executing project tasks and apply more pressure on the implementation of corrective actions. For those looking to analyze and improve their project processes more, this also can be great place to begin your daily  Gemba walks.

Companies using an Obeya may enjoy a number of benefits. Those include:

·        Efficiency: A project’s leadership team can save time by bringing helpful visuals, necessary information, and vital resources together in one place

·        Focus: Having key team members in the same room for collaboration and discussion means that project leaders can focus on the right issues

·        Collaboration: An Obeya fosters an environment in which employees can work together across disciplines and in real-time, rather than via e-mail or in rushed meetings

For project managers struggling to establish teamwork, visibility and accountability on their projects, Obeya may be the solution. With the ultimate goal of breaking down walls between team members and getting everyone working on the same page together, Obeya rooms provide big gains in both collaboration and problem solving, two features that are essential in project management.

The Benefits of Lean Visual Project Management

One of the greatest and most important challenges of project management is communicating clearly with your team about both the details and the big picture of your project. After all, it’s unlikely people will work on the right things in the right order if they don’t understand how each task– and its timely completion– contributes to the success of the project. One of the best ways to communicate with your team is via visual project management.

Visual project management is a method by which you can organize and visualize process over traditional projects and utilizing tools to help everyone involved visualize the status and needs of the project.

There are many benefits of visual management:

• Save time by simplifying the complex – Visual management helps people understand complex information at a glance, like what work items should be prioritized and who should be working on them.
• Reduce waste by communicating effectively – Take the guesswork out of teamwork by having a shared, common view of all work being done across the team.
• Overcome impediments to flow – See where work has slowed or stopped by creating a Lean visual management board that enables you to see bottlenecks and blockers.
• Collaborate and improve – Instead of pushing work blindly into team members’ queues, you can move work through our team process with a better understanding of capacity. This enables teams to collaborate in a healthier, more productive way.

Visual project management tools help bring the information to life, connecting the dots and painting a clear picture of the desired outcome, the current status, and any roadblocks that may be in the way. Visual management becomes a language that everyone can understand and explain.

A visual management board can help see the big picture, structure project activities, monitor and improve a team’s performance. Having a project board showing all the project tasks, their stage in the project life at any given moment can help significantly improve communication between team members.

More specifically, it enables the team to visualize the system, become aware of any constraints or roadblocks that might result, and begin a dialog on how to solve those problems. In this way, the challenges are directed to the system and how to solve versus focusing on the person as the issue. While there are many methods for collaborative communications, several common tools to foster the collaboration include consensus decision-making, A3s, Daily Huddles and similar problem solving activities.

Managing your tasks and overall projects require more than placing them in a sequence and attaching specific timelines to them. You need to adopt a better way to make your workflow transparent so you can continuously optimize your process and evolve it to create superior value for your customers.

Five Time Management Tips for Project Managers

There are three important factors that come together when determining the success of a project. These are, of course, quality, budget, and time. In this post, I am going to discuss the latter. Time management is one of the most difficult things for any project manager, especially when scope creep kicks in and things go wrong during the project lifecycle. After all, it is difficult, if not impossible, for a project to run exactly as you expected it to when you finalized your project plan.

Here are some tips that can help you manage your time more efficiently.

Get the project plan right

Of course, time management begins with getting your project plan right in the first place. When you start to execute anything without a plan, you spend a lot of time discussing what to do, how to do it, what it should look like, and so on. This chaotic approach is often the leading cause of misused time in a project, because when a project remains in the concept stage, nothing tangible can actually be accomplished. Therefore, when you are building your project plan, you need to talk to the people that are actually going to be doing the work, i.e. your team. Find out how long it is going to take for the tasks to be completed so that you can build a realistic timeframe and give a deadline that you can actually fulfill.

Deconstruct your tasks

Another important step when it comes to time management is to deconstruct your tasks. One of the big problems with projects is that it can seem like the end goal is extremely far away. Employees feel like they have a mountain to climb and this causes them to feel demotivated. Not only this, but it is hard to work efficiently when your objectives seem like they are still far away and this makes people fall off track. Therefore, if you break down a large project into smaller pieces, it will make it a lot easier to stay on track. This is because milestones will be reached on a continual basis and this will cause employees to feel more motivated and enthusiastic about the project. It will also ensure that everyone knows what they should be working on and when.

Effective communication and collaboration

The success of any project team relies on effective communication and collaboration. Some of the biggest time-related issues project managers face are delays in communication, and more often than not, those delays are not happening within the project team itself. Instead, stakeholders who were so invested at the beginning of a project are often the first to go silent after time has passed, and their priorities—and attention—has shifted onto new tasks.

The best way to maintain stakeholders’ timeliness is to find ways to keep them engaged with the project. Being able to analyze a stakeholder or organization’s preferred methods of communication is another powerful tool in keeping the necessary groups engaged. Maintaining these relationships with stakeholders is a very important aspect of a project manager’s work and the benefits of doing so successfully extend far beyond the reduction of wasted time in a project.

Dealing with scope creep

Another essential part of time management is dealing with scope creep. Any project manager knows that this is one of the most difficult things with regards to any project. When deliverables are not clearly defined, stakeholders are not involved or supportive, or tasks turn out to be more complex than initially thought, a project can be at risk for scope creep.

Starting a project without a clearly defined scope is like trying to drive from Los Angeles to New York City without directions. Sure, you could try and follow street signs, but you’ll eventually make a wrong turn and lose your way. You may never even reach your final destination at all.

The same goes for project management. The scope keeps you on track and makes sure you don’t miss anything important. It’s basically your project roadmap. When everyone on your team understands where you’re headed, it becomes much easier to complete projects on time and within budget.

Learn from your mistakes

Aside from this, project management is all about learning. With every project that you carry out, you need to learn from the mistakes you made in the previous project and this includes the mistakes that you made with regard to time management. Not only this, but you should not be afraid to use historical information to form judgments going forward. Historical information is a good way to determine how long certain tasks are going to take so that you can schedule accordingly. You can also use this to determine any of the issues you are likely to run into.

Hopefully, you now feel more prepared when it comes to time management for any project which you work on in the future. There is no denying that this is one of the most difficult aspects of project management and expectations for your team when handling any type of project. Nevertheless, as long as you learn from mistakes you make and you follow the tips that have been mentioned, you should be able to achieve time management success.