The Role of Project Management in a Small Business
For many small business owners, project management is only ideal for large, corporate-level companies as they require more complex processes that need to be streamlined, organized, and made efficiently.
In reality, project management is crucial for any organization—whether big or small—that seeks to get work done on time and within the budget, as well as achieve business goals efficiently. So, what does this entail? How can small businesses benefit from project management? Let’s find out by reading on!
Better process, boosted performance
Involving definitive starting and endpoints, a project is any activity—huge or small—that is carefully planned to achieve the desired result within a specific time frame. It ranges from ideation to development, execution to marketing, and tracking to evaluation.
Meanwhile, project management is perceived as the science of getting things done. It refers to planning and organizing a company’s resources using specific skills, knowledge, and tools to move a specific task or activity toward completion within a timeline. With this, managers can seamlessly navigate through obstacles in the process of identifying available resources, preparing a plan, meeting deliverables, knowing who the people responsible for certain tasks are, and more.
In small businesses, while project managers may not always need to deal with complexities, they face the challenge of getting maximum results using fewer available resources. This implies that organizing and allocating these resources must be done carefully.
Unfortunately, not all small businesses have standard, effective, and systematic processes that help get the work done efficiently. This is because some think that these aren’t necessary for small businesses, given that tasks are quite easy to oversee and manage. However, regardless if you’re a one-man team or an entrepreneur handling people, there’s always a standard approach for handling projects. If effective, this improved process can result in boosted performance.
Why opt for project management?
Let’s discuss the role of project management for small businesses and what it means for them.
1. More control
Projects that get out of hand can impede other important projects, tie up your business’ budget and other resources, and pull workers away from the current task to seek help. To avoid this, harnessing project management tools that help create protocols and practices to keep everyone and everything moving is the key to preserving and maintaining control.
2. Stay on budget and schedule
Business owners are highly concerned with the bottom line, thus they’re striving not to make room for wrong decisions and errors. With effective project management, business owners like you don’t have to worry about this because you get to keep your budget in check and follow your timeline. You can track expenses and check where your employees are spending their time. In addition, project management creates a concurred timetable and plan. As a result, you get to avoid overruns and disruptions.
3. Establish stronger accountability
Small business employees must make their roles and expectations clear to them. This way, they won’t wind up spending their energy on the same deliverables.
With good project management, roles become clearly defined and assigned. You won’t have to hear your employees ask who is responsible for what. Everyone will know when the ball is in their court, and as a result, tasks will be completed on time. In Flowlu, you can easily assign tasks among employees and keep track of their progress on a handy Kanban board.
4. Raises the chances of success
Oftentimes, success or failure boils down to whether or not effective time management of a project was implemented. We would often ask, “did the team allot enough time at the outset to prepare for the project?” After all, this is a skill that is often overlooked.
By setting goals and milestones through project management, things can be evaluated and monitored, and adjustments can be made accordingly. As a result, a business can easily get back on track when obstacles pop up and objectives are met.
Additionally, you get to increase your customers’ satisfaction rate with faster, more timely, and relevant business actions. To help you better track your customers’ relationship with your products, make sure to also understand how customer health score works.
5. Speed as a competitive advantage
Amid this fast-paced digital world, many employees work on cross-functional teams to complete tasks. We see that small businesses often collaborate with other companies as their subcontractors.
When employees from different companies can fully grasp a common project management process in getting their work done, joint work gets easier and more manageable. As a result, teams get more productive and tasks get completed ahead of time or on time.
6. Track expenses
Small businesses’ financial resources are oftentimes limited. Thus, they must keep an eye on how their expenses and how they utilize their budget.
Through project management, small business owners can keep their tabs on the items with bigger costs and the estimated costs, payments, and purchases. With this transparency, business owners like you can identify if your project is moving in your desired direction. In Flowlu, you can easily plan payments and expenses, compare them against actual results and calculate project profitability.
7. Effective evaluation
Post-project evaluation is important to identify what went wrong and what went well, so improvements can be made moving forward. With a good project management system, this is possible as it can provide documentation on milestones your business achieved, how employees performed, what the sticking points were, and where delays took place. As a result, this can strengthen team dynamics, make the project preparation process seamless, and help the business better achieve its objective as it moves forward.
In conclusion
The concept of project management especially for small and big businesses has been proven effective since then. We cannot deny that projects, whether big or small, can be time- and budget-consuming, taxing, and complicated. If not handled properly, a business may lose its direction and resources.
With the help of sound project management tools and practices, companies can ensure that their projects are delivered within their budget, on time, and with quality.
