Effective Project Management Techniques in Small Business
As a small business, you’re working on multiple projects at all times. You’re wearing one hundred different hats and a project manager is just one of them. However, it’s important to think of how to manage your desk and projects carefully. After all, they take up resources and time that you can't afford to lose.
Make sure you’re spending time on projects that have the highest chance of succeeding and are the most important for your business.
That's where project management techniques come in. These techniques can help you manage your projects effectively.
Focusing on the execution strategy of projects will help your everyday business operations and allow you to complete projects easier and more efficiently.
Let’s explore the techniques you can use to make your project management more efficient.
What Is Project Management?
Project management refers to overseeing a project from end to end in the most efficent and effective way possible from idea to initiate first steps, and final completion. Having proper project management in place can minimize mistakes, ensure you’re on track to hit your goals, and identify any areas of improvement.
This type of management involves accomplishing these tasks:
- Setting Goals
- Anticipating challenges
- Creating a project timeline / Milestones
- Creating a Plan
- Assigning Responsibilities
- Putting the Plan into Action
- Monitoring Your Progress and Performance
- Assessing and reiterating
The Best Techniques to Effectively Manage Small Business Projects
When you manage a project, you should use the following techniques to ensure efficiency:
Ambitious But Adaptable Goal-Setting
Setting goals as early as possible and ensuring they're adaptable is another useful project management technique.
It all starts with defining your project goals, so you have a clear understanding of what you need to do to meet them.
Ideally your goals are tied to metrics and you track them along the way.
You can set timeline goals, outcomes that you are looking for, money saved, etc. Be clear about what your objectives are.
With these goals, you can develop a plan to achieve, writing out the strategies and best practices that are going to get you there and address possible challenges ahead of the project.
By taking into account these challenges, you can ensure that your goals remain attainable or at least adjustable. Then, your project is more likely to succeed since you've made your plan more resilient to challenges and your team has a clear understanding of your goals.
Anticipate challenges, assess the risks
Risk analysis is a project management technique that starts by identifying the risks your business could face during this project. The risks could come in the form of running out of resources, overloading your project manager, having production delays, or any other challenges.
Once you've determined the possible risks, proactively find solutions to them. This will allow you to change course when there's an issue. Plus, you can create contingencies to ensure that you have another plan whether these risks occur.
Sometimes it’s hard to assess your risk when you’re so close to your business. You may be biased or used to your day to day operations. You could also consider bringing in an outside project manager and investing in part-time factional talent to help truly assess where your business is lacking.
Break Down Your Project Into Steps
Another project management technique is to break down your project. This technique works by separating a project into smaller parts and defining their goals. Then, you can assign these smaller goals to your project team.
When you break down a project, you make each goal easier to reach.
On top of that, it becomes easier to assign responsibility and keep track of everyones progress, holding them accountable.
Communicate Consistently With Your Team
For a project to run well, encourage communication across your team and parties involved in the project. Keep it transparent and concise, keeping everyone updated on the overall progress of the project as well as individual progress and challenges.
Set expectations with your team on response time and updates. It could make sense to invest in a fractional HR leader to coach your team on communication. If you’re team isn’t having open communication, project reviews and performance reviews, you could run into more problems as you continue to scale.
Furthermore, you should document what happens during your project from its beginning. Then, you'll need to share this document to your team. This offers them a reference point to review the project and can help you assess the project.
This technique allows you to:
- Understand Your Goals
- Set Expectations for Staff and Customers
- Communicate Changes and Progress
- Adapt on Time
- Exchange Feedback
Project Monitoring
Keep track of your goals for the project in your project management software, a spreadsheet or document that you present and review at your meetings. By monitoring the performance of your team and the progress they are making, you can decide if you need to change your process.
Moreover, this gives you a way to assess areas that require improvement so you can reach any deadlines or goals you’ve set. Don't just kick off the project and wish everyone on their way.
Set weekly meetings, goals, agendas and targets along the way. Make sure you can see live updates from your team throughout the week.
Project Review: Reflecting on Completed Projects
Upon project completion, it’s vital to reflect on the outcomes to drive continuous improvement. Celebrate the successes, noting the techniques and strategies that worked well and led to achieving project goals.
Acknowledge challenges faced, such as resource shortages or communication gaps, and analyze their impact on the project.
Identify areas for improvement, such as refining processes, enhancing team skills, and improving resource management.
This review helps ensure that future projects are more efficient and successful, contributing to the ongoing growth of your construction business.
Conclusion
By using the project management techniques above, your small business can achieve the goals you've set for yourself and grow your business.
From analyzing the risks your small business faces to celebrating your milestones, these techniques each ensure your staff is ready to take on the project and has the resources to do so.
If you realize you don’t have the full resources to do so, investing in fractional leadership could really help take your business to the next level.
