Gaining greater visibility and control over resources and projects is essential for enhancing effectiveness and efficiency in businesses. Businesses constantly under pressure from delivering products or services have to combat impending deadlines and plan their work effectively.
In such situations, businesses heavily rely on effective project management for success. Many small businesses are intimidated by the term “Project Management” even when it can help greatly improve their existing workflows enhance their business output. In this article, we discuss 6 ways Project Managers can help businesses grow.
1. Improve Project Estimation
Various factors influence the outcome of a project. Businesses unfamiliar with these factors bleed their profit to unknown factors, making it difficult for them to identify projects that yield the most profits for your business.
Project managers use upfront planning and estimation as crucial determinants to identify the likelihood of long-term project success. Estimation techniques taught to project managers give them a consistent way of estimating project resources and expenditures in the business workflow.
Using these project estimation techniques, a project manager helps you understand the impact of a project on resource capability, as well as the effect it has financially on the business’s operating budgets.
Project estimation can also help businesses standardize the way sales teams interact with customers and arrange quotations for specific projects. As a result, target estimation has a positive impact on customer satisfaction and productivity, while increasing the number of projects delivered on time and in the budget.
2. Making Most of Resource Capability
Resource Capability Planning is one of the key responsibilities of a project manager. The project manager needs to analyze the impact of certain projects and services on the business’s resource capability in real-time.
This helps the business achieve greater efficiency since project managers can identify which resources are currently available for a given project. Doing so helps businesses minimize resource wastage, making it easier to distribute resources appropriately to projects that need them the most.
Not only does a project manager keep track of all available resources, but it also helps you sustain your business and contribute to the quality of the products you deliver. Effective management of resource capabilities enables businesses to meet customer expectations, enhance business productivity, and minimize costs.
Although it appears to be simple, resource capability planning plays a critical role in providing a clear and consistent representation of the business’s potential, making it easier for owners to plan business growth.
3. Clear and Consistent Project Planning
Smart project planning is a necessary skill for any Project Manager. To guarantee successful project delivery, every manager spends significant time planning even before the project begins.
During the planning phases, managers plan activities, responsibilities, deliverables, and roles, needed in each project. Clear and consistent project planning helps saves project teams from failing projects, exceeding due dates as it reduces the risk of failure as long as the team performs according to the project manager’s expectation.
4. Selecting and Prioritizing Projects
Another key duty of a project manager is to maximize profits and minimize costs for businesses while at the same time eliminating project failures. Selecting and prioritizing critical projects requires exceptional planning skills and is something a project manager can help you with. Prioritizing work optimizes the business’s task management efficiency and reduces resource depletion.
One way project managers prioritize projects is through their business value. When in doubt, project managers estimate how a certain project impacts the business’s well-being both in the long and short term.
Similarly, project managers have to evaluate how the completion of a particular project affects your relationship with specific customers. If the completion of a particular project has significant effects on the future of the business (i.e., it’s a project of your main client), then you should prioritize it more than any other project.
Assessing the urgency of projects is also something project managers excel at. Most project managers have years of experience working in a professional environment, which helps them to estimate the urgency or critical nature of tasks effectively.
Lastly, many projects don’t have an overarching effect on your on their own. Although no project is of lesser value to business owners normally, when resources are spread thin, project managers need to say no to projects that are less critical for the company.
Doing so is not easy and it requires an in-depth understanding of the market, as well as the consequences of dropping projects of a particular business. Having someone with such abilities on your team is crucial for a business’s success.
Project prioritization can benefit any business regardless of its industry, size, or operational structure. Wherever you are, a skilled project manager can help you prioritize projects effectively and define an optimized, sensible order of work.
5. Visibility of Project Deliverables
Effectively management of project deliverables is critical for businesses regardless of their size. In fact, small-sized or growing businesses often have less mature, informal processes that require changes to make them effective project management processes.
A project manager can help these businesses define business cases more clearly and outline the benefits associated with each project. Project deliverables are different from milestones in the sense that they are quantifiable services or products made at the end of projects.
A project manager can effectively manage project deliverables and keep a close look on their progress with the help of project management tools. Using these tools project managers can evaluate each deliverable and determine how much your business profits or benefits from each type of deliverable.
6. Improving Cost Control
Preparing a project budget is a difficult task for anyone with proper project management training and experience. Project managers have the knowledge and expertise of making project budgets through software excels, utilizing project plans, and giving accurate project estimates.
This ensures that your business never leaks money and you can always monitor your spending effectively. Taking help from project management tools can further help the project manager’s estimations, helping you improve cost control and ensure delivery within financial restraints.
Regardless of the size of your business, a project manager is a critical resource of your business and plays a key role in enabling its growth, If you’re keen on learning the foundations of project management yourself, you can also apply for a credible online course to learn what you need.
Project Vanguard provides high-quality project management online courses to help understand the building blocks of project management. It’s difficult to fill a project manager’s role, but with the right guidance and training, you can boost your management skills and apply project management techniques to expand your business’s growth.
