Project Management
You may have considered making a change in the way your company works. Perhaps you have noticed that there are things that do not work and you have thought about reorganizing the functioning of some areas.
It is vital to understand what project management entails before beginning the planning process for any project. Knowing the phases make it up and the benefits that said management brings are determining factors.
Project management is made up of all those actions that you must carry out to meet a defined objective within a certain period during which resources, tools, and people are used, which have a cost that must be taken into account when the budget is being made. In the end, you always get final products that must correspond to the initial objectives.
Any organization today, to some degree or another, manages projects. Regardless of its size, the activity it develops, or the sector in which it operates, a project can range from a large specific job for a client to optimizing an internal process within the organization itself.
- Control the start and evolution of a project.
- Notice problems that may occur and their solutions.
- Lead towards the completion and approval of the project.
The objective when doing project management, after all, is that you make an original product and that it meets a specific need of the client. It is often more complicated than the standard way of marketing, in which a customer buys a product to meet their need.
In a project, however, the product must meet a defined demand. This is one of the difficulties of project management since there are usually no precedents in the organization.Advantages of project management
Project management will bring a series of positive aspects that will help your company to progress:
Maximizes the company’s operational capacity: By managing projects, you can increase the efficiency of daily work, since all tasks are adjusted to increase your productivity.
In addition, communication between the different areas of the company is encouraged, allowing all members of your organization to know in detail what their responsibility is and to be able to focus on it.
This leads to proper time management to get multiple tasks done and cost reduction.
Coordinate resources: This improvement in communication can help, for example, so that the different areas of the company that works with the same supplier combine their activity, making it more efficient.
Gives an overview of the company: Knowledge can be transferred between the different departments, preventing them from acting independently. With this, it is possible to know the real capacity of the work team, in addition to more quickly identifying weaknesses and risks to enable their correction and allowing priority to be given to the areas that most need it.
It allows a faster reaction to change demands because it facilitates fluidity in daily work.
It offers a customer perspective, as the project’s ultimate goal is to meet a specific client requirement, to the extent that the client is the one who supplies financial resources to your organization. In this way, quality is improved, since your product or service will have to adapt to the demands of your consumers.
Facilitates learning from the past: With project management, knowledge is accumulated about the appropriate way to develop a certain task, which allows some processes to be standardized. This ensures future repetition becomes easier, faster, and cheaper.
Avoid risks: A well-managed project minimizes the possibility of failures and errors that lead to cost overruns.
Improve the company’s image: As project management leads to a more efficient service, it conveys an image of professionalism, competence, and seriousness that can be very useful for you to increase the value of your brand.
All these reasons justify that project management is of great importance in the current corporate organization, although many companies still do not take it into account. But when you are going to implement this strategy in your company, you must keep in mind that there is not only one way.
Phases in project management
When managing a project, keep in mind that it has several phases, which are always the same, and there are four:
Planning: Planning is the first phase in the management of a project and is before its development. In this phase, you have to define the activities that will have to be done, and estimate the duration of the project.
The task management phase involves creating tasks, allocating them to personnel who will carry them out, determining their duration, specifying task dependencies, and prioritizing them. You also have to indicate what the necessary resources will be to be able to carry out the project successfully.
Programming: This is the second phase of project management, and consists of creating the project execution schedule, indicating on what dates each part of the project will be done, including the start and end dates. This phase, together with the planning phase, is before the start of the project.
Monitoring and control of the project: This is the only phase in which all of the project’s management is carried out. It entails keeping track of and directing the process. In other words, obtain data on the evolution and take the correct measures in the event of any inconvenience. Flexibility and responsiveness are essential for good project management. Let’s not be naive, no matter how much we plan a project, we will always have to introduce changes to resolve an incident, facilitate the work of the men and women involved, etc. If we want to be successful, we need to be able to adapt and deal with change.
Analysis and evolution: This is the fourth and last phase of project management, which happens after the project has been completed. In this, what is done is to measure the differences between what was foreseen during the planning phase, and what has really happened, normally it is usually measured above all the planned budget and the real cost.
This phase is also important because it allows us to observe the mistakes that have been made throughout the process and learn from the experience for future projects.
Our effective management solutions adapt exactly to your needs, analyzing what services your daily operations require to ensure that your company reaches maximum efficiency in document and project management, guaranteeing total security, accessibility from any place where it is needed, and saving both time and money. You can schedule a free consultation now.