When running a business, you’ll likely have many different projects and tasks being undertaken simultaneously across your team. Some of these will be undertaken by individual teams, and some will require the cooperation of multiple departments. Because of this often chaotic level of work that is undertaken, managing your entire project portfolio, which essentially encompasses each and every one of these individual projects, can be very difficult. To help you with your project portfolio management, we’ve put together a few tips that could improve this process significantly.
Have A Top-Down Focus
First of all, you’re going to need to prioritize your projects, and this is what we generally mean when we say you should focus on a top-down approach when deciding on which projects to take on. The issue you’ll have with not having this prioritization is that your teams may start focusing on tasks that aren’t important and putting more important jobs on the backburner. Instead, you should learn to prioritize your company’s projects to ensure your most important tasks are completed first before you move on to less mission-critical projects.
Keep Up To Date With Project Managers
Each one of your projects cannot be solely managed by yourself, no matter how dedicated you are to your work. You’ll want to allocate project managers to each project so that someone is responsible for each individual project. That way, those managers will have ultimate authority over their own projects and will be able to delegate tasks to each member of their team. Those managers will then answer to you, providing you with reports on their progress as well as any problems they’ve run into or help they require, whether that’s more people-power or resources.
Develop A Strong Team
You’ll also want to make sure that you’ve built as strong a team as possible at each level of your business. Having a great team will allow you to feel much more confident that everyone is able to handle the tasks they are given and that managers will be able to manage their projects effectively, too. For current employees, you could also offer further training such as leadership programs for women in your team. This will help you prepare certain promising team members for a leadership role while also ensuring that you are focusing on diversity and inclusion. Your project managers can all benefit from further training to strengthen their decision-making, communication, and overall project management skills, to name a few things.
Utilize Project Management Software
Managing your project portfolio is naturally going to be more of a challenge than focusing on one particular project. However, you can make this easier by using the right tools. In particular, project management software will allow you to properly oversee your business’ entire portfolio, following each stage in detail. Project management software is very beneficial to a business. This will help you stay up to date with every stage of each project, allowing you to see what has been completed, what is still in the works, and what has been delayed if anything. You’ll be able to use this software to advise you on which projects need attention and which can be left to your project managers.
