Project Management For Your Team
Help your SMB team stay on task and engaged with project management.
By Andreas Tremel
Small businesses often think that they don’t need project management. After all, the team is so small, and sometimes so are the projects. But what are you going to do when a big, high-stake project comes along? Small businesses who have experience with implementing project management methods are definitely at an advantage when such an occasion arises. Here are project management tips that will help you and your team stay on task and engaged.
Planning tasks
Planning is key in project management, and in business in general. Before you start a new endeavor or project, you need to identify the steps you need to take to reach your project objectives. After you have created a task list, sort and prioritize them. Remember to only concentrate on one task at a time. Multitasking only gives you the illusion of productivity.
Most businesses will start with task management, but with business growth come bigger and more complex projects. More complex projects also mean higher budgets and higher risks. This is where you need to take the next step and fully embrace project management if you want to ensure the quality of your projects and complete them successfully.
Managing time
Time management is a skill that not only project managers need, but is a critical skill of any successful business. Being able to manage time effectively, and as a result work more efficiently and productively, is a skill that every business owner, team leader, and employee needs. The key to managing time is to identify which tasks create the most value for your business and to concentrate on these tasks.
Methods such as the Pareto and the Eisenhower principles help you identify the tasks that bring about the best results (Pareto), and which are not just urgent, but also important (Eisenhower). The next step is to estimate how much time you will need to finish the tasks and create a schedule based on your estimations.
Improving processes
The aim of every small business is to grow, and to do so you have to continuously improve. Lean and Six Sigma are two management methods that help you streamline your processes and improve their quality. It’s important that the whole team embraces the chosen method, though, or else, any endeavor towards streamlining will fail.
The principle of Lean Project Management is easy: eliminate waste, i.e. eliminating any steps in your processes that do not create any value. Six Sigma is a structured approach to optimize your processes and reduce ‘defects’ or errors. The benefit of this method is that you can not only measure the results of the improvement, but also the quality of the improvement.
Delegating and outsourcing with project management
Small business owners often have the feeling that they need to do everything themselves. However, your team won’t be able to work effectively if you’re hovering above their heads and micromanaging everything. Burnouts are a real risk and taking on too many tasks can easily lead to one. As a leader and to be a successful business person, you need to learn to delegate tasks.
If your team is geographically dispersed or works from home, you need clear communication processes in place to make sure everybody knows what they have to do to avoid misunderstandings and confusion. At InLoox, we have limited our internal communication to emails, which are retraceable and can be transformed directly into tasks, and phone or Skype calls, which are time efficient and great for dealing with urgent matters. We also encourage an open-door policy in order to keep communication flowing.
Embracing change and collaboration
Change is essential for business growth, bit it is something that people are still often hesitant to accept. As a business owner, you will have to take the lead and create a company culture that facilitates change and innovation. To do so, you will need to communicate to your team that it is okay to fail, since innovations are often products of ‘failures.’
However, keep in mind that uncontrolled change can lead to so-called ‘scope creeps’ usually leading to cost increases. So it is important to always have a clear change management process in place.
About the Author
Andreas Tremel, Co-Founder and CEO of InLoox, is responsible for strategic development and product development as well as for the company’s marketing and communication strategy. With over 15 years of experience in developing software solutions, Tremel has made InLoox’s priority to build a PM software that would add value to the standard procedures of task management.
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