With the year coming to an end, it is a great time for a Productivity Ninja to reflect on both the strengths and weaknesses of your business. Productivity can be hard to uphold over the festive months and instead of falling behind your competition, prepare for the year ahead. Not sure where to get started on your productivity overhaul? Get motivated! Here are just a few reasons why your business should adopt a project management approach in 2017.
Take Control and Plan Ahead
It isn’t time to wind down just yet, start your business’s New Year’s resolution now. After all, project management is all about finding the time to plan ahead.
Project management and time management training will motivate your team to be more efficient, improving estimation planning within your organisation. Giving your customers clear and correct estimations is a major factor if you want to maintain a successful long term business and now is a great time to estimate the resources your business has before the start of 2017.
Have a think about what needs to be improved and how these improvements could impact your operating budget. By planning decisions and timings projects are more likely to be successful as well as being on budget.
Make sure that your staff are comfortable creating estimations for clients. This may mean investing in project management training, as the better trained your staff are – the more productive they will be.
Learn to Prioritize and Reduce Risk
The old saying, walk before you can run comes to mind. Make sure that you have your priorities right going into 2017 and firstly make sure you have the skills to see them through.
Many businesses try to perfect their whole business at once, sadly, this will not work. A project management strategy will allow your business to work towards an end goal, tackling problems as you work towards it. If your business is currently growing, project management is a great way to reduce risks. During this period, it is also important that your business prioritizing projects which offer a greater return of investment.
It is true that with any project, comes the risk of failure. This is why it is important to prepare before going ahead with a plan. The most successful project manager will plan ahead for these risks, creating a strategic proactive plan.
Collaborate and Communicate
The most frustrating thing that can occur within a team is lack of communication. By creating a plan that a whole team can follow, means that a Project Manager can encourage their team to collaborate and work together, using their skills to the best of their abilities.
Project management skills will encourage your team to share contributions that work towards a common goal. What’s more, collaboration is known to lead to efficiency and innovation. “Collaborative planning”, can also be great for team bonding and motivation as it will promote shared responsibility within your team.
These skills often don’t come naturally and they must be learned. There are a number of great training programs that will benefit your business as a whole, including Prince2 training and APMP certification. Developing your employees will create a positive spiral effect within your business as studies show that 76% of employees want opportunities for career growth.
Create a Team of Productivity Ninjas
If you are not managing the progress of projects strategically, then your team will become unproductive and unmotivated. By training your team to use their new project management skills, projects will become more structures and they will begin to flow better.
Setting goals is a huge part of being productive in business, Productivity Ninjas believes that it is not just your project manager that can make a difference using planning, but the whole team:
“Striving towards a company-wide goal is great, but what is more important is the creation of team goals and milestones which need to be achieved. These should be discussed openly and written down so every member can see what it is they should be doing”
Having a team and a project manager who are consistent, means that it will improve productivity, efficiency, and ultimately cash flow.
Get a head start and get ready for the challenges that your business may face in 2017. If you think that there are areas for your business to improve with a productivity consultant, there are a number of professional time management workshops available that will help your team tackle their winter blues just in time for the new year.
By Melissa Lang
Melissa Lang is a professional from Glasgow, Scotland. Melissa is currently working with Datrix Training, guiding businesses to a more productive future.