Saturday, December 18, 2010

Six Benefits of Good Project Management

The good project management will provide many benefits, including:
  • Happy customers. Whether a project is for outside customers or groups within your organization, customers like to get what they want when they want it. Because the first step in project management is finding out what your stakeholders and customers want to accomplish with the project, your customers are more likely to get the results they expect. And by keeping the project under control, you’re also more likely to deliver those results on time and at the right price.
  • Objectives achieved. Without a plan, projects tend to cultivate their own agendas and people forget the point of their work. A project plan ties a project to specific objectives, so everyone stays focused on those goals. Documented objectives also help you rein in the renegades who try to expand the scope of the project.
  • Timely completion. Finishing a project on time is important for more than just morale. As work goes on for a longer duration, costs increase and budgets blow to bits. In addition, you may lose the resources you need or prevent other projects from starting. Sometimes time is the ultimate objective, like when you’re trying to get a product to market before the competition.
  • Flexibility. Contrary to many people’s beliefs, project management makes teams more flexible. Project management doesn’t prevent every problem, but it makes the problems that occur easier to resolve. When something goes wrong, you can evaluate your plan to quickly develop alternatives—now that’s flexibility! More importantly, keeping track of progress means you learn about bad news when you still have time to recover.
  • Better financial performance. Most executives are obsessed with financial performance, so many projects have financial objectives - increasing sales, lowering costs, reducing expensive recalls, and so on. Project management is an executive crowd-pleaser because it can produce more satisfying financial results.
  • More productive, happier workers. Skilled workers are hard to come by and usually cost a bundle. People get more done when they can work without drama, stress, and painfully long hours. Moreover, they don’t abandon ship, so you spend less on recruiting and training replacements.

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