Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Successful Business Management: Leverage the Key Tenets of Project Management
As a Project Management Professional (PMP)® and business consultant, I appreciate the benefit of applying tested project management principles to (you guessed it) effectively manage projects. Did you also know that these same principles may be leveraged to manage your small business activities? The principles of project management can give you new ways to think about old problems.
There are nine project management principles (commonly called “knowledge areas”) defined by the Project Management Institute. I’ve outlined these nine knowledge areas below focusing on their relevance to methodically managing your businesses many facets:
- Integration Management: Integration Management emphasizes the larger tasks that must be completed for the business to work. In other words: coordinating each part of the business. Your business plan certainly embodies this principle.
- Scope Management: The goal of Scope Management is to outline the business need, set expectations, deliver to the expectations, manage changes, and minimize surprises.
- Time Management: Time Management is concerned with the business resources, activities, and schedule management. It involves defining and sequencing activities and estimating the duration and resources needed for each activity.
- Cost Management: This area embraces cost estimating and budgeting. A business owner must control cost and make changes to the financial plan accordingly.
- Quality Management: A quality plan must be created early since decisions made about quality can have a significant impact on other decisions about scope, time, cost and risk.
- Human Resource Management: This area involves human resource planning such as roles and responsibilities, business organization, and team management planning. It also involves assigning staff; assess team members’ performance, and overall management.
- Communications Management: This area focuses on keeping the stakeholders accurately informed. Communication is a blend of formal and informal, written and verbal.
- Risk Management: This involves planning how to handle risks. The business owner must identify risks and also plan on how to respond to risks if they occur. How likely is the risk to happen, how will it affect my business if it happens, and how much will it cost if it happens?
- Procurement Management: This area concentrates on a set of processes performed to obtain products or services from an outside business. In other words, what is the business plans in regards to purchasing products or services?
Although chiefly applied to manage projects, those key tenets can widen your horizon by providing additional ways and means to help you – and your business – succeed.
Christian Damiba is the Center Director of NYC Business Solutions, Upper Manhattan.If you have comments or questions for him, please drop him a note in the comment section below! And, don’t forget to share this post with your network via Facebook, Twitter, email, etc.
