Are you an Entrepreneur or Small business Owner and struggling with ideas on how best to grow your business? I suppose Brexit may have now taken you to round three sixty degrees and uncertainty is driving you crazy! The advice from the ESBM-Hub (https://esbm-hub.co.uk/) is that you need to focus on those aspects of your business which you can control and manage to grow your business and sphere of influence. Your business needs a boost with a dose of better and more efficient ways to manage projects. Ops! Projects, now that is something not in my league. True, most entrepreneurs get thrown by the wayside the moment the buzz word “Project Management” is flicked at them. There is this aura of hesitation and fear of losing control of the business. Most small business owners believe they can go it alone in their business and always adopt a know it all attitude until sales figures nose-dive and go pear-shaped. With an avalanche of project management tools or software, the task becomes daunting, gradually followed by a sense of cluelessness.
This is the point at which ESBM-Hub comes in handy to rescue your business and empower you to regain business confidence and run business operations as effectively as possible. As industry experts, ESBM will institute diagnostic tools to identify your business weaknesses and threats and help you turn around these into viable business opportunities using cutting edge best practice business productivity tools and project management software and advice. Identify your business operations into optimisable projects and programmes, ESBM will help improve your business and to enhance a grip and effective control over your projects and business fortunes. Here are some useful tips to help Small businesses improve business efficiency and productivity:
What is a Project and how is it distinguished from a programme or business as usual operations?
A project is basically a temporary business venture or activity that produces something unique and of value to the business and its clients. This could be a product, service or result that fulfills a business need, a strategic objective or meet market demand. The project outcome needs to produce a lasting effect that is beneficial to the business and meets demands in the market. A business venture undertaking more than one project at any one time becomes a programme. A Project ends once a deliverable as defined in the project has been delivered. The repeated production of the product qualifies as a usual business operation or activity.
Put simply, the design of a small baby toy is a project and a repeated or mass production of a similar baby toy becomes operational production. The production of a bay toy and a doll, for instance, makes a programme for the small business owner.
What is the role of project management in a small business?
Business success does not just happen just because you are producing products in a business. A project manager with the right skills needed in a business to ensure successful project delivery. This is a person who will oversee the production of the product from its start to finish, paying attention to detail regarding the project scope, resources and time required to produce the product. This is the defining point that separates business efficiency and whether a business is profitable, efficient and delivering quality products. How can this gap be bridged or optimised depends on executing a masterpiece of planning, effective communication, organisation, risk management, coordination and effective control of the business? This is achieved by optimising the “Triple Constraints” critical for the delivery of the products.
The ESBM Project Management Golden Triangle is designed to give you a complete overview of the project development cycle and highlight those areas as a business you need to maintain visibility and control over your project and resource utilization.
Project
It is important form the onset to ensure the project is assigned to a competent person to manage the project with the right skills to oversee its successful implementation from its inception to delivery. The
project manager needs to take a lead role in the project. Putting a team together and assigning clear roles and responsibilities to the team. Sharing clear information about the project, what needs to do when and by whom, making sure resources are available at the right time they are needed and in the right quantities and making sure things are done according to plan.
1. DETAILING AN ACCURATE PROJECT SCOPE
The PROJECT SCOPE is an important part of any project planning that specifies the specific project goals, objectives, deliverables, deadlines, any limitations, dependencies and assumptions that need to be done to deliver the project. The Project Scope forms the basis for every decision the Project Manager makes and informs the Project Communication Plan.
2. PRECISION IN PROJECT ESTIMATION
Problems in many businesses surface at this point as a result of failure to accurately estimate the project resources and budget needed at every stage of the implementation process. Several tools exist to support the budgeting and scheduling of resources that help inform the business of the impact of every step in the process and how it impacts the project’s “Triple Constraints” including the quality of the final product or service. Accurate project estimation provides a consistent and reliable system through which the project teams communicate effectively for the project’s success. Proper resource planning facilitates team efficiency and performance in delivering work packages, reducing waste and meeting customers' expectations.
In cases where there are multiple projects proposed for implementation, in small businesses, usually, it’s the dominant person who will decide the sequencing and prioritisation of projects which may be based on their personal likeability tastes and egos. We can work with businesses to capacitate them with effective decision-making tools that can rank and prioritise projects towards greater business profitability based on the meticulous alignment of resources at their disposal, the skill levels and stakeholder expectations. Don’t leave critical company decisions tom chance, it’s a profitable business and not a game of Poker.
3. EFFECTIVE STAKEHOLDER MAPPING
A lot of business fails at the implementation stage of projects as a result of failing to carry out an effective stakeholder mapping exercise. Projects usually involve several players who have both positive and negative impacts on their success or failure. By getting to know stakeholders who have an interest in the project, it helps get an insight into their thinking and expectations. Tools exist that can be optimised for your business to clearly identify these stakeholders and gaining an insight into their expectations which helps appropriately classify them into the right perspectives. Stakeholder analysis helps build intelligence for stakeholder requirements, their influence, and importance in the project. Advice will be on hand as to which stakeholders you always need to keep informed and which ones can adversely impact the success of your project and what is it that you can do to achieve success for your projects. Not understanding your stakeholders is like navigating in the dark. You need to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
4. SOUND PROJECT RESOURCE SCHEDULING VITAL PROJECT AND BUSINESS SUCCESS
Your business needs to employ effective tools for scheduling your resources in real-time and establishes the feasibility of the project plans. This allows you to position your resources at the right time, place and moment. If resource constraints occur during implementation, you need sound advice on how to optimise your resources through an effective scheduling process that provides the ability to smartly inform the project team on optimum resource utilisation. By being able to tap into your resource base. You will be able to assign the best alternate resource utilisation to deliver projects in a win-win situation and maintain constant revenue inflows.
5. OPTIMISING MANAGEABLE WORK PACKAGES AND DASHBOARD VIEW OF PROJECT DELIVERABLES
For your business to prosper, it's critical to effectively manage project outcomes, particularly for small businesses. Why? Because the gearing ratio for small businesses is high for project failures and impacts the business much more adversely than big businesses with high provisions to absorb business losses. Most small businesses prefer to cut corners, hence they have less or ineffective project management processes, business cases are often not rigorously scrutinized and critically analysed and little or no formal processes for justifying projects. It is important for small businesses to get experts to advise on the minimum threshold for progress monitoring and projection of delivery schedules. Simple Dashboard can be employed which allows the stakeholders to constantly monitor progress on projects even when they are on holiday or in the comfort of their homes. This allows them to respond instantly to issues and decisions that have the potential to disrupt the business and even push it into liquidation because of avoidable issues.
Many small businesses still use basic excel project reports which must be updated manually and hence prone to errors and often falling behind schedule with the potential of delaying critical processes and missing essential targets and delivery schedules. Tracking the project progress can be a daunting and challenging task particularly for small businesses that may not be prepared to invest a lot of money in monitoring resource usage. We can closely work with your business to recommend online task management software or tools that can inform your business and important stakeholders with standard systems of capturing progress on each project and highlight when bottlenecks that can delay the project are likely to occur and what options for resource optimizations are available.
6. EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION ON PROJECTS IS THE LIFEBLOOD OF AN BUSINESS
On average it is said that every project manager spends at least 90% of each day on a project communication with stakeholders and project team members about the project. Many businesses overlook the importance of a clear project communication plan and tools on the overall success and growth of the business. We can recommend some of the most effective Online task management and collaboration tools. This helps reduce communication gaps and provides institutional capacity building within the teams and proliferation of cross-functional skills and the ability to institutionalize effective standard decision-making tools that are good at problem-solving, greater efficiency for the business and prospects for growth.
7. WHAT TO DO NEXT?
As earlier said, never leave the performance of critical deliverables of your project to chance or adopting a know it all attitude. The impact on the business can be catastrophic when it backfires more so if these are issues you could have avoided. It takes just an effort, that first step to contacting us could make a world of difference to you, your business, stakeholders, and revenues.
Joshua Chigwangwa is a Managing Partner and Co-Founder at ESBM-Hub and can be contacted at Info@ESBM-Hub.co.uk.
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