5 Ways to Amplify Project Management Benefits

As a project manager, you know that effective project management increases project outcomes and delivers improved business results. Here are ways to strengthen the benefits your project management practices provide to your projects and your entire organization.

Deploy repeatable methods. Applying consistent project management processes across projects is a great way to beef up the benefits of project management in your organization. You save time and effort — and increase productivity –because people don’t have to learn new approaches and processes every time they work on a project. Your teams already understand the project artifacts and expectations for delivering a successful project.

That’s not to say you can use only one project methodology across the organization. Each project should use common practices for the methodology that is most appropriate to the project. For example, standard WBS structures in waterfall projects and standard sprint structures for agile projects provide iterative learning as team members apply familiar practices time and again.

Continuously improve your project management methods. On every project, make a point of reviewing your approach, whether waterfall, agile or hybrid. Monitor their effectiveness and make adjustments to enhance the benefits project management delivers. 

Measure benefits through standard project metrics. As the saying goes, “You get what you measure.” Standard metrics provide the compass heading for increasing project success within your organization. And increased project success means better business results. Look for trends in metric results: in different product areas, business divisions, and personnel. These trends can highlight areas of weakness and enable focused improvement initiatives.

Project management benefits only become evident when you apply standard metrics across your entire project portfolio. Of course, agile and waterfall projects are controlled differently, so you apply different metrics for those approaches. For example, baseline versus planned schedule and cost variances are typical project metrics used in many industries. In agile projects, sprint burndown and velocity are typical metrics.

Improve results with supportive reviews of projects, project managers, and project teams. A supportive review differs from an audit. An audit is considered successful usually when faults are identified. In contrast, reviews set out to discover what worked well, so those successful approaches can be implemented across the organization. Reviews find areas that were suboptimized and explore the source of ineffective action. In addition, you can identify and address issues that weren’t handled well – or not at all. The focus is on learning from the past rather than finding who is to blame. This focus on continual improvement not only delivers better project outcomes but also increases your team members’ confidence in delivering projects.

Demonstrate benefits with cumulative project results. Metrics such as estimation accuracy, customer satisfaction with project outcomes, and actual ROI against plan are telling when examined across many projects within your business. These metrics are powerful indicators of the impact of project management on your organization. Ongoing improvement in these performance indicators leads to improved organizational health and increased agility because projects are delivered faster and with better outcomes. (Keep in mind, these metrics require diligence and effort to collect, so you need to encourage management to support their consistent use.)

What project management benefits have you seen in your organization? What actions have you taken to enhance and promote those benefits?

For more about project management metrics, check out my LinkedIn Learning Project Management Foundations course.

Coming Up

Tatiana Kolovou and I will talk about communication techniques in a LinkedIn Office Hours broadcast on September 30 at 1pm MT.

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