Five Key Benefits of Project Management


Every once in a while it is worth reminding ourselves of the value of project management. For us that are in the project management field, there should be no question that project management provides value to an organization. However, when you meet skeptics, are you able to articulate the benefits? Here are five key benefits. 
Better Planning Helps Set Better Expectations
How many times have you heard about or been involved in a project that was not as successful as it needed to be. Did you ever spend time looking back to see what caused the project to go wrong? If you did, chances are that you said, "You know, we should have spent more time planning."
Project management focuses first on planning the work. This is a vital discipline, and allows the project team and the customer to have common perceptions of what the project is going to deliver, when it will be complete, what it will cost, who will do the work and how the work will be done.
Value statement: Project planning helps sets realistic expectations, establishes the path to success and makes sure that the right work gets done. 
Save Time with Standard Processes and Templates
People intuitively understand that it is faster and cheaper to reuse something that already exists rather than to build something similar from scratch. If your organization creates a set of project management processes and templates that are used consistently from project to project, each instance represents a savings of time that would otherwise have been spent on building the processes from scratch.
Value statement: Utilizing common project management processes and templates saves the cost and time associated with having to develop them from scratch on each project. 
Utilize Proactive Project Management Processes
People who complain that project management is a lot of 'overhead' forget the alternative. Your project is going to face issues. The question is whether you will proactively resolve them or figure them out as you go. Your project will face potential risks. Will you try to resolve them before they happen, or wait until the problems arise? Are you going to communicate proactively or deal with misunderstandings caused by lack of project information?
The characteristics of the project are not all going to change whether you use a formal project management process. What changes is how the events are dealt with when the project is in progress. Are they dealt with haphazardly and reactively, or proactively with a smoothly running process?
Value statement: Having proactive project management processes in place allows you to anticipate what will happen on the project and be prepared for various contingencies. This will ultimately help projects run faster, cheaper and at a higher quality level.
Avoid Surprises with More Effective Communication
If stakeholders are not kept informed of the project status, there is a much greater chance of confusion due to differing expectations. In fact, in many cases where conflicts arise, it is not because of the actual problem, but because people were surprised. Project management provides a structure and a vocabulary to communicate what is going on.
Value statement: Proactive communication allows you to better manage expectations, avoid misunderstandings and conflict, and provides better information for decision-making.
Build a Higher Quality Product the First Time
Practicing simple quality management helps you deliver to a higher level of quality and avoid the expense and time of having to fix things after the fact. This helps avoid quality problems and rework that surface toward the end of the project. The entire project can be completed better, faster and cheaper. 
Value statement: Quality management helps you build your deliverables correctly the first time and saves time and costs by discovering problems as early in the project as possible.
Summary
It is not possible to give an exact set of arguments that will convince executives at every company. The arguments you use for one company might fall completely flat at another company. However, regardless of your situation today, the basic value points above probably hold true in every company.

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