Project Management – Your Business Needs It!
But why? We’re doing just fine. Well if you are doing just fine, then you are already operating effective project management and you can give yourself a pat on the back… but if not hopefully this will give you a bit of a steer!
To simply answer the question of why, if you don’t have an orderly way of delivering your services to your customers (project management methodology) then at least one or, gulp, a fabulous combination of the following will happen – sorry but it’s a fact!
- You will forget to make sure that the business case (the reason for doing the work) is correctly assessed. How can you be sure the project should go ahead? How do you assess the justification during the work? If you don’t, you will lose money!
- Quality will suffer. How are you judging/assessing the quality of your deliverable? Is it any good? How do you know? If you have poor quality, the customer will not be happy and you will lose money!
- You will not deliver what your customer wants without intervention of a higher power. You will lose money!
- Communication between the team and, more importantly, with the customer will not be clear. You will lose money!
- Who’s doing what and when are they doing it? Stuff will get missed. You will lose money!
- The budget won’t be tracked and you will lose money!
- You won’t know if you have a problem until it’s too late. You will lose money!
- You will waste time at a management level discussing how a project is doing without any real clue as to what is going on. Everyone will have a different opinion. You will lose money!
These are just eight that I can think of, but my experience tells me they are the most prevalent problems. There is a common thread by the way – did you spot it? Yup – you will lose money!
What do I mean?
- Well, if the customer is not happy, they will either not pay you fully or bad mouth you so that you get no more business – the latter is the worst thing that you can allow to happen.
- If the team don’t know what’s going on, they will work on the wrong things at the wrong time. This means that both project team and management time is being lost to the business.
- If the budget is not being watched, you will spend money on the wrong things.
You get my gist. Of course, the next question is what to do next?
There will be other posts to help you with this, but start by making sure you have some simple methodology that makes sure that your customer work is being tracked for quality and against budget. And make sure everyone knows what is going on by communicating regularly!
What are your thoughts? Have you some hints to help businesses manage their customer projects more effectively?
Tags: business management, Project Management, Project manager, Risk Management, Small Business
