Project management strategies: Maximising efficiency and enhancing performance

Proper project management is crucial to any organisation’s success, no matter its sector. Ad hoc supervision and direction won’t do a single thing to improve your business outcomes. Without effective project management, your project is inevitably doomed to fail.

Appropriate management will improve your team’s efficacy, efficiency and accuracy. It will also help reduce mistakes and delays, and time is money! If you’re a project manager or team leader looking to get the most out of your colleagues and investments, keep reading to learn more about the foundations of project management and best practices to deliver improved outcomes.

Fundamental project management concepts

• Risk management: To mitigate any potential harm, you need to do everything in your power to control potential outcomes and implement an action plan in the event that something goes  awry. You must spot potential risks, assessing how likely they are and what kind of impact they’ll have, as well as what you can do to salvage the situation (should the risk become a reality).
• Task management: Create a project roadmap that lists every task involved to keep team members on track. Include the task’s description, who’s responsible for it, what needs to be done before and after it’s completed and a timeline. Make these plans available to every team member. Decide how regularly you’ll hold meetings to discuss progress and check-ins with each employee to determine whether they need assistance or if anything is hampering their work.
• Resource planning: You must appropriately allocate resources to every team member. This means determining how much time and what assets and funding they’ll need to complete their task. Resources tend to be finite and sometimes costly, so taking a strategic approach is going to save you money, help you stay within budget, maximise resource efficiency, ensure nothing is wasted and assist you in meeting deadlines.

Proper resource allocation is vital for ensuring nothing goes to waste.

Project management best practices

• Development methodologies: Simply put, a development methodology is an approach a team decides to take that guides how a product is developed. Whatever strategy you choose needs to account for damage control and any changes that need to be made to workflows. There are two main types: agile and waterfall.The former is non-linear, focusing on multiple product iterations as feedback is received. The latter is stage-based, wherein one phase begins only after the previous is completed and updates are made only when the product is completed.
• Process automation: While no project (or, at least, very few projects) can be undertaken completely devoid of human activity, workflows can be enhanced and sped up using carefully selected automation. It involves using technology (usually data-driven or powered by artificial intelligence) to automate certain tasks.These are generally mundane and time-consuming, so automation frees up time for team members to focus on complex assignments. It also improves accuracy by preventing human error in numbers-based work.
• Agile management: Like the agile approach to product development methodology, agile management refers to a flexible way of handling projects based on incremental progress. Rather than ensuring one final product is delivered, it allows for multiple deliverables to be submitted as they’re completed and updated throughout the project’s lifecycle.With an agile project management framework, organisations can communicate and collaborate with clients during every stage of the deliverable’s development. It also permits the team to pivot and reassess their workflows and timelines if there are any hiccups along the way.

Are you interested in enhancing your organisation’s project management abilities? Check out our project management training course. Alternatively, contact us to find out how we can best assist your team.