Looking at a career in project management — or to boost your skills in preparation for a big project or promotion conversation?
Then you might already know that efficiency is fundamental to every project. Simply put, the amount of good, quality work your team can complete in a given time directly impacts your company’s success — as well as yours as a project manager (PM)!
So how do you increase efficiency?
Let’s explore some of the essential components of efficient project management and how you can implement these strategies into your workflow.
First, the Foundation: What is Project Management?
At its core, project management involves using techniques and skills to complete tasks for a specific project or assignment, usually within a designated time frame.
In a business setting, it usually means managing a team to reach your end goal. And, there’s an added element of making sure the project stays within a certain budget and the outcome contributes to the organization’s overall goals and objectives.
Think of project management as a coach building plays for a game of football. In football, plays help the athletes move the football down the field methodically to score points. In business, project managers lay out the necessary steps and tasks to complete the project, and help move them toward completion — ultimately helping the organization to score!
Every step from initial conception through project completion (and further optimization of the deliverable) is part of the project management lifecycle. Project managers typically work with various departments to:
- Delegate and track tasks within the development team
- Work with operations on budget creation and progress
- Provide reports and updates to leadership
- Help sales and marketing create the right promotional language
10 Tips to optimize efficiency in project management
If working on diverse tasks across various functions sounds exciting to you, or if you’re already doing it and could use some support optimizing your efficiency even further, these project management tips are for you.
Make your goals crystal clear
When everyone who’s working on your project is moving toward the same clear set of goals, the less time people will waste getting off-topic. And the less you’ll have to spend refocusing their efforts.
Goals should be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Goals will differ with each project, and each department will probably have different goals for the same project. That means lots of communication should happen at this stage. Whatever goals you set, they should still contribute to the broader business strategy.
If you want to go even further to increase efficiency around setting and aching goals, check out how Olympians approach goal setting.
Maintain stakeholder buy-In
Stakeholders are no longer silent entities in the background, but rather collaborative partners throughout the project development process.
To decrease interruptions and “sidequests” throughout the project and ensure smooth sailing, project managers can follow these steps to optimize engagement:
- Identify Key Stakeholders: Primary stakeholders will be the most involved in a project, often taking a hands-on role from beginning to end. For example, if you’re building a product, development department leads are going to be heavily involved in your project. These are the folks you’ll want to pay special attention to.
- Use Clear Communication Channels: Establish appropriate communication channels for each stakeholder involved in the project. An open line of communication will help facilitate informed decision-making, thus decreasing time-wasting distractions and questions, throughout the lifecycle of the project.
- Address Feedback: Project managers need to do more than just listen to stakeholder feedback, to keep stakeholders engaged and efficiency high, address/incorporate stakeholder feedback as quickly and thoroughly as possible.
Get more agile with the scrum methodology
Scrum is a methodology used to break large projects into smaller tasks that are completed using continuous feedback and experimentation.
The purpose of this is to improve the project as it’s being worked on, rather than once everything is finished — which may introduce bugs and require more budget.
A key aspect of the scrum framework is the sprint. A sprint is a designated period of time that a team has to complete their work. At the end of each comes a sprint review: a working meeting to review the product or service and its features with leadership and stakeholders to determine if any additional development is needed.
Adopting scrum and sprints increases collaboration and makes room for ongoing improvement, which is something you’ll see me recommend a lot because it eliminates rework and end-stage optimization, thus improving project efficiency.
Build effective communication strategies
Whether your project involves a single team or requires collaboration among several departments, it’s so very important to foster open communication — especially for remote workers!
Consider various lines of communication — Slack, Basecamp, Microsoft Teams, etc. — that you can use to share updates with stakeholders and resolve questions with team members to keep everything humming along.
Be willing to be flexible
You may have already noticed this theme, but project management habits and models should be highly adaptive — to the project at hand as well as to your organization’s changing needs and goals.
Oftentimes, the key to efficiency lies in your flexibility to evolve with the changing landscape of project management and your industry.
Work closely with marketing
The goal of most marketing teams is to attract and engage with potential leads throughout their carefully defined marketing funnel.
Their success in capitalizing on buying intent depends on your communication as a project manager. How can they accurately describe what you’re creating, who it’s for, what benefits it holds for your target audiences, and what differentiates it from various versions of your competitors? Only with your input.
Active collaboration with marketing helps the team avoid rework, get their messaging to market faster, and make their efforts more effective at bringing in buyers.
Plan ahead for hiccups
Risk management of course plays a vital role in project management. During the planning phase, it’s crucial to think about what major risks could come up, evaluate their probability of occurrence, and work through how you would handle each to continue on to project completion.
This proactive approach allows you to effectively minimize the negative consequences of project risks and stay efficient as bumps in the road arise.
Implement ongoing quality assurance
Conducting quality assurance (QA) alongside each finished sprint can help teams maintain a high level of quality and prevent simple mistakes from becoming larger, more costly, and more time consuming.
Routinely monitoring project quality is also a strategy to guarantee stakeholders’ needs and expectations are being met — again, reducing rework.
Review performance regularly and openly
Regular performance evaluations throughout the course of a project are an effective way to track and improve progres while making sure it continues to meet the SMART objectives you set at the beginning.
Additionally, I would also recommend bringing the whole production team together to hold these reviews. Keep it positive to inspire a sense of trust and camaraderie around “beating the final boss,” which can boost productivity and efficiency.
Prioritize continuous optimization and improvement
Is a project really ever done?
While some certainly can be, in the modern business world our products and services often need little tweaks even after they’re built to innovate, improve performance, and simply keep up with changing trends and audiences.
Accepting the idea of interaction and building it into everything you do — from project planning to budgeting to stakeholder reporting — will be crucial to maintaining efficiency as well as your sanity when projects feel like they’re stretch on forever.
Keep building your project management skills
Efficiency is key to success in project management, directly impacting company outcomes as well as your success as a project manager!
Integrate these essential components of efficient project management into your workflow and see how they aid you in getting that first job, or that next promotion, you’re aiming for.
Prepping for an interview? Don’t miss: Ten Project Management Questions You Should Always be Prepared for.
Author: Zaida Marston is a content writer specializing in B2B SaaS, tech, and healthcare. Her work has appeared in U.S. News 360 Reviews, TechTarget, History-Computer, and MindBodyGreen. With a background in theatre and creative writing, Zaida blends creativity with research to write SEO-focused and value-based content.
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