The Benefits and Importance of Project Management

You’ve probably heard the term ‘project management’ floating around a lot and are questioning how necessary it really is. With so many project management software options available, and so many different concepts to come to terms with, getting your organization to follow the A-B-C of project management might feel slightly Herculean.

However, it’s possible that you’ve already been doing project management without even realizing it. After all, project management is simply organizing your team to assign, track, and execute bite-sized tasks that pile on top of each other to form a project. Processes like these, even without project management software in place, tend to represent the day-to-day of many businesses.

What is indisputable is that the bare minimum project management looks very different from great project management. As you read on, we’ll walk you through why the latter category is so important and highlight the benefits of a structured project management game plan.

Of course, project management is far easier with the aid of software. If you’re getting started with project management, have a look at our list of best project management software for small businesses guide. Our favorite is monday.com because it has an incredibly smooth and user-friendly interface but, if you want to shop around, you can use our free comparison tool to find a provider that works for your business.

What is Project Management?

Project management is quite a broad term that, specifically, refers to organizing, tracking, and executing all the tasks and goals necessary to produce results for long-term projects. You can therefore think of a project as a larger puzzle with individual pieces that represent a bite-sized task that you can assign to team members.

As you might’ve guessed, good project management can be incredibly helpful to get your team to deliver results and requirements on time, letting you reach your very coveted project Key Point Indicators. This is especially helpful when you have a larger project on your hands and, without good project management in place, deadlines and resources can dangerously fall by the wayside.

Therefore, your project management wishlist should include the following items:

• The project will be delivered on time
• The project won’t go substantially over budget
• There will be minimal roadblocks during the project
• The project will be delivered uncompromised, and according to the specifications

What is Agile Project Management?

Agile project management brands itself as a hands-on approach to project management. The full manifesto for this project management method isn’t too long, but it boils down to experiences and interactions with the individual over a plan that’s set in stone.

While Agile Project Management was originally formulated to aid software development, the principles are broad enough that they can be applied to any long-term project, like graphic design or architecture.

As an example, here are a few of the core principles of Agile Project Management drawn from the project management manifesto:

• “Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.”
• “At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.”
• “Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.”

As you can tell, the soul of Agile Project Management is frequent communication. While this may slightly impede day-to-day work, it does mean that the project’s overall flow will be far smoother, result in fewer delays, and rule out last-minute changes.

What Are The Benefits of Project Management?

Aside from the obvious avoidance of deadline panic, and arriving at a stakeholder meeting empty-handed due to a lack of project results, project management is replete with benefits. Here are the main ones:

• Boosts team collaboration: project management lets you break down a massive deliverable into smaller, bite-size chunks that you can assign to each team member. This gives everyone a fair workload based on their pipeline and gives everyone ownership of their own contribution to the project. This will help each team member deliver their best work, and will make working together as a team a much smoother process.
• Eliminates confusion: if you’ve ever leapt into a project without a plan, you’ve experienced how messy it can get. The constant logistical questions, chasing deadlines, and the realization of going massively over budget form part of the confusion that is indicative when no cohesive project management is in place. Having a complete, structured plan gives you a clear idea of the scope and timing of your work, allows you to assign tasks to the right people, and spot conflicts before you’ve started.  The added visibility that project management gives you lets you and your team stay on track, making sure you are delivering on time.
• Creates clear goals that improve efficiency: having a clear path towards your final project management destination will give you a better idea of how to organize your budget and resources, avoiding possible waste. Another added bonus is that it’ll be easier to spark intrinsic motivation among your team because everyone will have their compasses pointing due north. This will make your role as project manager is a lot easier. Having a clear plan can also help reduce stress and burnout, leading to a reduced number of employee absences.
• Improves customer satisfaction: good project management, at its core, includes lots of stakeholder communication. Therefore, all the way from the ideation of the project until its execution, as a project manager, you’ll be updating your stakeholders and ensuring you are delivering results on time, and to a high degree of quality. These constant updates that are interwoven into your project management help keep your clients in the loop and, hopefully, satisfied.
• Optimizes your risk management: even with great project management in place, you’re bound to run into obstacles as you move towards your project’s finish line. However, great project management gives you enough visibility to identify when and where these issues might spring up. This lets you allocate the right resources to stop the issue from becoming a crisis.

Why is Project Management So Important?

At the heart of every project is the need to deliver in time, within budget, and to a high degree of quality. The part of how you get there is different for every business, depending on the project and the industry. What remains the same is the value of having good project management in place. The TL;DR of it all is that project management:

• Ensures deadlines are respected: project management lets you keep track of when specific tasks are due, and it lets you allocate resources and time accordingly, so you don’t have any logistical headaches down the line.
• Makes you stick to your budget: while the saying ‘money makes the world go round’ is cliche, it certainly holds a lot of truth when it comes to project management. From the start of your project, you will have a budget that is set in stone that you need to respect, so project management is a crucial factor that will ensure you are making the most of it and, importantly, don’t exceed it.
• Keeps you on track to deliver: when you don’t have a clear idea of where you’re heading, it’s easy to get lost in a spiral of flexible deadlines and misassigned tasks. Great project management ensures that you have a clear idea of who is doing what and when, mitigating the need to chase after deadlines, and helps avoid awkward stakeholder meetings where you have no good news to report.