Why Project Management Can Help Your Company in a Slow Economy

In an economy that's just bumping along, U.S. businesses are being put in a challenging position. Companies need to find ways to reduce their bottom line, so they can increase profits.  One of the keys to helping your company be successful is Project Management.    One of the benefits of Project Management is it helps in balancing customer requirements against company goals and objectives while focusing the organization’s resources on keeping the project on schedule and within budget.

Companies who use project management report:

• Increasing customer satisfaction
• Increasing company profits
• Completing products on schedule
• Completing products on budget
• Increasing employee satisfaction
• Decreasing redundancies in process
• Increasing usefulness of company’s computer hardware and software

Project Management will help customer relations:

• It gives your company greater communications and allows you to track the scope of work and help you to react quicker to risk
• Helps to keep your client up to date giving the more control of the project and increasing their satisfaction

Project Management may  increase company profits:

• The Project Management process has saved companies millions of dollars! Companies of all sizes can benefit and find rewards in implementing project management processes

Project Management methods can be used by many types of companies from small business to large billion dollar companies to help in the slow economy.   Even a one-person company can use project management to help them become organized, manage their projects within budget, and on schedule. Project Management is simply communicating  with project team, customer, and stakeholder on project status.

Remember scope creep (if diagnosed properly) can be profitable for a company and if handled correctly, a different way of managing people, products and services.  Companies  find they are better able to focus on product development by having each product or service handled as a project.  The customers are very happy, because they only have one person to deal with when they have questions and concerns.  The firms are excited by the additional profits generated by keeping the new product development on schedule and under budget.

Project Management is a proven method for developing, designing, implementing, and producing products and services ant the lowest cost and in the shortest time possible.  By using Project Management tools and processes, you will improve your company’s profits and improve customer relationships which will help in this slow economy.

Di you know that 80% of all projects fail due to lack of communications?  Communication is a key puzzle piece of managing a successful project.    Some of the keys to running a successful project in a slow economy are:

• Define the scope at the beginning of the project. The scope must be defined clearly to the customers, project team, and stakeholders.
• Get teams buy-in to the project by getting them involved in developing the detail part of the schedule
• Baseline schedule, cost, and scope up front and use a change control system to keep on track
• Identify risk at beginning of project and have risk abatement plan for each risk
• Remember the schedule is a tool to help the project manager complete the project on schedule and within budget
• Celebrate the project’s major milestones with the project team
• Communicate, Communicate, Communicate

In summary, project management can help your company survive the economy slowdown by helping you to manage your scope, schedule, risk, quality, and communication in an efficient way.