Project management is a critical part of any business. Wait, let’s be a little more forceful: Project management is absolutely essential to business success, and, without it, your projects and initiatives are doomed to failure. Better?
Obviously, it helps to ensure that projects are completed on time and within budget. Project management can also help improve communication between team members, and ensure that all stakeholders are kept up to date on project progress. But there’s so much more to project management than these surface-level benefits.
So, why is project management important? Here’s a deep dive into the 10 benefits you won’t want to miss.
1. Set Realistic Timelines
The biggest risk in project management is overestimating how much you can get done and how quickly. Effective project managers (using project management software) can much more accurately estimate the time and resources needed to complete work, which allows for project leaders to set realistic timelines. This minimizes the chaos for everyone involved and increases the chances to deadlines will be met.
2. Meet Deadlines
When you have a tight timeline for activities of any sort, blown deadlines can cause all sorts of problems for your business. This is exactly what happens when you don’t have a solid project management system in place. The art of project management is the art of understanding all of the tasks that must be accomplished before a final submission is made — and a deadline is met. Without project management in place, it’s only natural that your team will regularly miss deadlines.
3. Manage Capacity
It’s no secret that people are the most important resource any project manager has at their disposal. And while it might seem like herding cats to get everyone on the same page, proper project planning can ensure that the team is available when needed and that other resources like the budget, tools, and funding are allocated effectively to avoid project delays.
Organizations waste about 12% of all resources due to ineffective project management. When you master project management, that waste disappears.
4. See Your Current Projects
If you work on a content marketing team, you’re often put in the difficult position of choosing what projects to prioritize and what projects to de-prioritize. Now, if and when someone’s project gets de-prioritized, they are going to want to know exactly why. Without a high-quality project management platform in place, you will not have a quick and easy way to demonstrate your workload and where all of your current projects stand.
But, when project management is handled effectively, you can simply show anyone in your company a dashboard that outlines all projects currently in process, along with their deadlines, as well as their priority levels. When you can provide visibility and transparency into the current project workload, your relationships across departments will grow much better overtime.
5. Communicate Effectively
Another reason to implement a project management platform: communication. It’s difficult to communicate about projects via email and even messaging apps like Slack. You need a central place where communication can happen and a place where messages live in perpetuity for quick and easy reference.
Communication allows for tasks to be completed and for important deliverables to change hands. Communication also allows project teams to quickly solve problems and leap over any hurdles that get in the way.
6. Boost Productivity
People always seem to be looking for the next big productivity hack, when really, the answer is right in front of them. Project management is all about utilizing resources efficiently and having an effective system in place. When a project team is able to do these things, it can easily get more work done in a shorter amount of time and increase productivity.
Of course, this is easier said than done. But that’s what the field of project management is for — helping teams overcome these challenges and reach their full potential. So if you’re looking for a way to boost productivity, you might want to start with project management. It just might be the answer you’ve been searching for.
7. Control for Quality
There’s always pressure in project environments. But project management accounts for the pressure and ensures that, no matter how hectic things get, all tasks are completed before launch. Tasks like quality control.
The QC process is essential whether you’re building a mobile app or publishing a blog post. Anything less than quality will undermine your brand. Project management ensures that quality control takes place, no matter what else is going on with the project.
8. Enhance Morale
Project management removes the chaos from any work environment, which increases team members’ satisfaction and overall team confidence. If you want your team to enjoy waking up each morning and coming into the office (or logging in via a remote workspace), project management is an underrated way to pursue that objective.
9. Reduce Costs
Have you ever wondered why so many projects go over budget? Or why they never seem to reach completion on time? It’s not because the people working on them are incompetent. In fact, it often has more to do with the fact that they’re not using project management techniques.
That’s right—poor project management is one of the leading causes of wasted money and resources. According to PMI, 9.9% of every dollar spent was wasted in 2018 — due to bad project management. That’s a lot of money that went down the tubes. But there’s good news: by investing in a project manager, organizations can reduce costs and improve efficiency. Project managers are experts at mitigating risks, optimizing resources, and keeping projects on track.
10. Reach Business Objectives
When you find yourself asking: Why is project management important? This is the real benefit : Effective project management helps you reach business objectives. This is true when you were talking about development projects. This is true when you’re talking about constant projects. And this is true when you’re talking about sales initiatives. You must have effective project management in place if you hope to turn the vision for the future of a company into a reality.
Bonus: Always Use High-Quality Project Management Software
A project manager without project management software is like an artist without a paintbrush. That is, a project manager cannot hope to do the job effectively without the right software in place. Stats back this up. The vast majority of successful project teams are using project management software.
I’ve already written a lengthy post recommending the best project management software for different endeavors. Use this list to choose the right project management software for your team and your company, and make sure that your projects maximize their potential.
Is there a project management benefit that I missed? If so, feel free to reach out to let me know. Or, you can always just add it to the comment section below.
