The right projects can help smaller businesses to progress, just as they help larger companies too. There is certainly no need to feel that your business is too small to handle projects. Indeed, this can be the smartest way of growing and facing up to challenges.
If you are interested in taking on projects in the future then you will want to know how best to go about it. Fortunately, this is a lot easier to do than you might initially fear. So how would you be best getting started with it?
Choose Your Projects Carefully
Smaller companies have to be very carefully about choosing the projects that they take on. While large corporations can deal with a number of large projects at one time, you need to be careful that you don’t bite off more than you can chew.
This might mean that you need to create a spreadsheet of possible projects for the future. You will then want to go through this regularly and decide which ones are most urgent and which others can wait a bit longer.
A good example would be a piece of work that is needed due to emerging legislation. There is simply no way of putting this off, while a project to introduce new technology might be something that you view as being less urgent.
Clearly Define Your Scope
Another issue that you need to avoid is that of turning each piece of work into a massive effort. If you have limited resources to use then you will need to be very careful about the scope that you define for any project.
This means that you should be very clear from the outset about what you want it to cover. Naturally, you will also want to be clear about what is shouldn’t cover too. This might seem obvious to you, but as the work continues it can be easy for project managers and business analysts to lose track of what they need to do.
After this, the next task is to avoid scope creep. This is the dreaded problem that occurs when a project just keeps getting bigger and bigger as new elements are added to it.
Train Some Project Experts
If you want to run successful projects then it is clear that you need a good team to work on them. There is simply no way for any project to succeed if don’t have people working on it who know what they are doing.
Will you bring in dedicated project workers or shift people across on a secondment basis each time? The truth is that it probably depends upon the number and scale of the projects that you plan to carry out.
Either way, it is important to train your project manager and analysts as well as possible. This could mean sending them on PRINCE2 Course London to learn everything from scratch or else to brush up on their existing knowledge.
Don’t Let Your Projects Interrupt Your Usual Work
It can be very exciting to start running projects for a small business. This is a moment when you realise that you can look forward to the future by shaping your company to meet the demands and take advantage of the opportunities.
Yet, is there a risk that you let your business as usual effort slip because of this? There is definitely a possibility of this happening, as running a project team well takes time and money.
Therefore, you should be very careful to maintain a strong focus on your usual work too. If you do this while running useful benefits then you are sure to discover the benefits long into the future.