How to Plan A Project Within Your Small Business

A proper project management team is known to be a building block within an organization’s progress and success.

13:31 12 February 2020

The way different departments are coming together in order to deliver goals is what defines an organization as being successful. Moreover, no matter how small your business might be, if you’re able to plan projects and increase your business efficiency by implementing various tools and being valuable support for your employees, means you’re already on the right path.

What project management involves? Compared with a larger organization and more successful businesses, managing projects in a smaller organization implies a set of unique challenges. Here some of your best project managers should be able to find proper solutions for every aspect of the project to hit established goals according to a schedule and a budget. Here are some insights on how a small business management plan should evolve:

Establish A Methodology

A project methodology is one of the most important factors that will determine your business efficiency. Today every business leader relies on a large number of project management methodologies. How so? Instead of getting overwhelmed by an abundant wave of options, business leaders and project managers have decided to make more informed choices for their business. Making use of this knowledge can offer you more valuable insights on what languages other managers use, analyze their methods and compete with their best practices. In short, a methodology is a necessary system of practices, procedures, techniques and rules, used to deliver successful business projects.

There are multiple types of methodologies that can be used in a business, but this easily depends from one organization to another, applying different principles, frameworks, processes themes and standards to provide an effective structure for projects.

With a suitable methodology you can:

• Keep track of every stage of a certain project and asses if you’re on the right trail
  
  
• Offer your management team proper guidelines where everyone should stick to from start to finish
  
  
• Establish processes and procedures to minimize time spend on making decisions and avoid overspending
  
  

Methodologies are highly necessary within an organization no matter how small this organization might be. The right methodology must offer a structure to your projects, inform you on how to define both responsibilities and roles, track and set deliverables and proper project planning.

Define Roles and Responsibilities

One of the biggest challenges in project management is the attribution and definition of employee roles in projects which oftentimes requires involvement and expertise from an entire organization. Simply put, a certain hierarchy is well-defined by every individual’s level of involvement.

Simply put, you need to designate key employees that are able to supervise certain aspects within a project as well as executants. You can start by determining which person suits best to a position that needs to be occupied. Keep in mind that the number of employees you’ll need in a team will highly depend on the time frame you’re going to implement and deliverables needed. Make sure you won’t overpower someone with difficulty to execute task because this might harden your project.

Create Detailed Project Documents

Detailed project documents are a must in every business project management. Such documents must serve as a guide for your team and must contain every goal, task and deliverable. Depending on the project’s difficulty, you may need the following:

• Scope statement - As the name suggests, this must include objectives, problems that should be solved, benefits for your organization, a key performance indicator and limitations.
  
  
• Deliverables - Must specify every deliverable that your organization aims to produce, the work that must be executed, and the rest of the activities.
  
  
• Milestones - Marking the start of each project phase
  
  
• Interdependencies- Such a task will only depend on the completion of a previous task before starting.
  
  

Develop a Realistic Schedule and cost Estimation

We know very well that no matter the size or budget, making a project estimation can be a headache. To create an efficient estimate, you should know inside out everything from your team, tasks, deliverables and process. This estimation is essential thus, it will help you determine how much money and time is needed to fulfil a project. Time and money are important resources for every type of organization, so no matter in which project stage you might be, the Online Timesheet Portal can offer you overtime calculations, or limit rules that will improve your project efficiency in a secure and reliable manner. To develop a realistic schedule and cost estimation, you may start with the following:

• Prioritize task that requires additional resources
  
  
• Estimate costs for each activity
  
  
• Don’t overlook possible limitations that your team might have
  
  
• Identify interdependent tasks and create a schedule that won’t impede the entire project
  
  

Efficient Communication and Approval Process

No matter the stage your team has achieved, you’ll have to check in with every member of your team and ensure everything goes as planned on paper. Most probably you won’t desire a lack of communication because this might be detrimental for the entire project. There are various management tools you can use to make sure everyone is up to date with their tasks while others will be able to check the new steps. If everything works properly your stakeholders can verify the current stage of your project and suggest potential changes.

Regardless of how well-thought your management plan might be, you must be prepared for failure. Because you know very well your management plan, you’ll get to analyze and plan a way to mitigate such effects in case they’ll occur. Every successful businessman knows that without imagining failure you simply cannot attain those fruits. 

However, rushing your project as soon as you’ve planned it won’t bring you any good. Failure can be one of the best teachers when it comes to that, because rushing into a project without a steady plan may only bring you bigger and even expensive mistakes later.