Smart Project Management: 7 Budget-Friendly Strategies for SMBs

Project management helps companies understand and work as per the stakeholder’s expectations, avoid conflicts, and deliver tasks within a specified budget and time.

It thus plays a pivotal role in defining a firm’s performance and revenue growth.

However, project management comes with challenges that can be mentally taxing for managers, especially in small and medium businesses (SMBs).

Unlike large corporations, SMBs have a tight budget and limited resources.

Despite this, project managers require staying abreast of the latest technology trends and innovations to deliver peak performance.

In such cases, an unsystematic approach can impact project management processes and lead to poor business ROI.

On the other hand, successful project management bolsters SMBs to become revenue-generating enterprises.

This post will share seven cost-effective ways to help SMBs improve their project management, thereby scaling their business.

1. Define your goals

Clearly defined goals allow the team to focus on crucial aspects of the project while ensuring the quality of deliverables.

Here are a few crucial questions to help you define project goals.

• Who are the clients and major stakeholders for this project?
• What are their prime requirements and expectations?
• Are their expectations realistic and SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound)?
• What is the project budget and deadline?
• Are the stakeholders looking to overcome any specific pain points?
• What can be the project’s potential outcomes?
• How do you define a successful project?
• How will you achieve the expected results within the given budget and resources?
• Do you have the resources to track the project’s success?
• What can be the consequences if the project gets delayed?
• How will you resolve unexpected errors and delays?

Answering these questions will help you set SMART goals and strengthen your project management strategy.

2. Develop a solid project plan and budget

A solid project plan can accelerate efforts toward achieving the defined goals.

It offers a blueprint of the project value proposition and implementation steps for team members, clients, and key stakeholders.

Besides, deciding on a budget before starting the project allows managers to leverage resources wisely.

While creating a project plan and budget can be research-intensive, the entire process is worth it.

Here are a few crucial tips to consider.

• Collect and understand stakeholders’ requirements: Create project scope by documenting the details of deliverables, assignments, costs, and deadlines. Discuss them with the clients and major stakeholders to understand their expectations.
• Figure out the required time and budget: Speak to your team and check out the available assets. This can help you understand the time and budget required to successfully implement the plan. Ensure it meets the client’s expectations.
• Define project activities: Break down the work plan into small tasks and activities. Define the steps required to reach the end goal.
• Identify potential risks: Thoroughly examine your action plan to identify potential risks and worst-case scenarios that can arise during its implementation. Determine their impact and identify ways to mitigate them.

3. Choose the right team members

According to McKinsey, effective teams perform consistently, build actionable strategies, and help win stakeholders’ trust with ease.

In short, your team can make or break your project, so you must choose the best workforce.

Here are a few tips to ensure selecting a high-performing team.

• Define the required level of expertise: What skills are pivotal to ensure 100% successful project completion? – Identify the required skills and expertise and shortlist professionals possessing them.
• Conduct an assessment: Assign short project-related tasks to the shortlisted teammates. This practice can help you understand their professional strengths and ease decision-making.
• Arrange an interview: Speak to the team members to analyze their communication, interests, problem-solving abilities, and collaboration skills.

Identify the ones who can take ownership at work. This can help you build a team that can deliver quality work regardless of work pressure or distractions.

• Assign roles and responsibilities: Be upfront about the project requirements. Assign roles and tasks to each team member as per their expertise.

4. Leverage budget-friendly and effective tools

While free-of-cost tools like Google Sheets and Docs can help you with initial project scope documentation, you need a more effective tech stack to execute the action plan.

Feature-equipped tools are often costly and may not be suitable for SMBs on a tight budget.

However, there are several budget-friendly yet powerful tools you can leverage.

Here are a few examples to get started.

• Project management system: Project management tools like Paymo can help managers create, assign, track, and manage crucial tasks without hassles. It allows them to gain a bird’s eye view of ongoing assignments to ensure quality and error-free project completion.

Source

On the other hand, it helps teams collaborate effectively and accelerate their efforts to meet project specifications and pressing deadlines.

Kunder, a rapidly growing SaaS company, leverages Paymo for project management.

Here’s what Kunder’s CCO, Manuel says:

“I know what to tell our clients and how to manage our commercial speech with them, as well as be able to give them information about the schedule of our new projects.”

• Digital Asset Management software: Organizing digital media assets like documents, images, audio files, and more is challenging for project managers and teams, especially in small business setups.

That’s where cost-efficient tools like Digizuite’s digital asset management system (DAM) can help.

Source

This cloud-based DAM software provides a centralized location to organize, store, and access digital content. It allows teams to streamline content distribution across multiple channels for marketing-related projects.

Dura-Line, a telecommunication company, uses Digizuite’s DAM to empower its small marketing team. The tool helps them streamline content marketing campaigns to achieve desired outcomes.

• Social Media Analytics tool: Managers should be extra careful with social media projects. They need to keep a tab on social trends and target markets to identify what’s working and what’s not.

Here, social media analytics tools like Keyhole can be the best bet.

From tracking customers’ historical data to ongoing trends, popular hashtags, and more, it helps managers and teams assess and create winning social media marketing strategies.

Anonymous Philanthropy, a US-based fundraising firm, uses Keyhole for social analytics. This practice has helped their team track project campaigns and thrive in the social ecosystem.

5. Maintain transparent and open communication

Transparent and open communication helps create a positive and healthy work culture.

It allows team members to share their views, innovative ideas, and project-related challenges with the manager without hassles. This practice imbibes a sense of camaraderie and trust between team members and managers, thereby strengthening relationships.

Here’s how project managers can encourage open communication.

• Provide multiple communication channels: Besides face-to-face interactions, stay connected to your team via phone, email, chat, and other internal communication tools. Be an active listener to ensure your team feels comfortable expressing their thoughts.
• Arrange meetings: Let your team members get to know each other. Arrange meetings at frequent intervals to help them share their project-related concerns, challenges, views, and more.
• Collect feedback: Gather your team’s feedback to improve work processes. Create an anonymous feedback and survey system to help your team share their concerns freely and honestly.

6. Track project and team performance

Track your project progress and team performance consistently right from the start.

This can help you understand the ins and outs of your project and allow you to prioritize crucial tasks.

Moreover, you can identify and mitigate risks on time, helping you move the needle. This can lead to successful and quality project completion within the deadline.

With Paymo, you can track the following:

• Task duration by setting a start and end date, thereby managing deadlines.
• Project priorities (low, critical, high) by applying filters.
• Task hours budget by setting predefined hours to do the task and comparing work hours against it.
• Budget by setting an alert when the task reaches a certain percentage of its budget.
• Individual employee progress and time spent on tasks. The performance widget helps managers assess the team’s activities, thus improving productivity.

7. Conduct a post-project evaluation

Does the project meet the stakeholder’s expectations? (If not, what went wrong?)

Post-project evaluation (PPE) can help managers and teams review vital aspects of the completed project, including the costs, time, assets, and more.

They can analyze their team’s performance from understanding what went well to the substantial flaws.

PPE thus helps them understand and work on micro and macro details and deliver power-packed performance in their next project.

Here are a few vital aspects of successful PPE.

• Time management: Calculate the time your team spent on the project.
• Budget: Assess the capital outlays that occurred during the process, including additional costs (if any).
• Flaws and gaps: Analyze what factors led to additional spending and missing deadlines. Besides, analyze the output quality and whether it met clients’ expectations. Request feedback from the client for details.
• Team performance: Check your teammates’ progress reports and identify the best and poor performers. This can help you build a better team in the future.
• Team discussion: Gather a detailed review of project experience from your team. Discuss what tools and strategies eased their hassles and what didn’t help. This can bring your project strategy’s strengths and weaknesses into the spotlight.

Conclusion

Effective project management empowers SMBs by fostering productivity, efficiency, and outcome quality. This practice can help them evolve into large-scale, profitable organizations in the long term.

However, tight budgets and resources often derail them from achieving their goals.

Leverage the cost-effective tactics and tools shared above to take your project management to the next level.

First published on April 28, 2023.