Maximising Efficiency: Key project management skills to help you do more with less

Businesses are facing many challenges. They have fewer resources, supply chains are being disrupted, costs are increasing, global economies are seeing a decline in growth, and consumer spending is also being affected by inflation and the cost-of-living crisis.

We work with more than 5,000 L&D teams worldwide, and many are now asking: “How do we do more with less?”

One way to tackle this is by improving and upskilling teams in project management, as it can help organisations to:

• Make an impact across the business and enable success
• Maximise team efficiency
• Preserve resources
• Reduce and control costs
• Ensure projects run on time
• And ultimately do more with less

The core project management skill areas your teams need

Over the past few years, organisations invested speculatively in the future – and we saw a sharp rise in demand for digital transformation and digital skills.

Whereas now, while digital skills are still required, businesses should be looking to develop core project management skills to support them deliver better outcomes, including:

• Planning:

  The foundation of every successful operation or project – and a core skill that enables teams to do more with less. This includes planning the project schedule and timelines, allocating and budgeting resources, managing costs and much more

• Time management:

  One of the most important aspects of doing more with less, as it helps you ensure you’re hitting essential milestones, completing projects on time and not wasting time unnecessarily

• Risk management:

  This is crucial to helping you anticipate and promptly address potential issues that could impact project success. It involves risk identification, analysis, response planning, monitoring and control. Which helps to prevent costly mistakes, reduce rework, and avoid delays

• Communication:

  This is the backbone of a successful project and is crucial to doing more with less. As it helps you outline project requirements and plans clearly, define roles and responsibilities, reduce misunderstandings, prevent errors, and increase overall efficiency

• Budget management:

  A core part of doing more with less, budget management includes estimating, allocating and tracking costs throughout your project lifecycle, and will help you stay on top of project expenses, avoid cost overruns and make informed decisions about where to allocate resources

• Stakeholder management:

  Internal and external stakeholders have a huge influence over resources, investments and key project decisions. Which is why it’s so important to identify key stakeholders, communicate project objectives and status, manage expectations and engage them for their input at every opportunity.

Want to find out more?

You can download our new guide, which takes a deep dive into these six core project management skill areas. The guide also identifies some signs that indicate why teams need to develop these core skills and some specific key skill areas which will help them to become effective project managers.

We are also running a free webinar on Wednesday 19 July from 16:00 to 17:00 (BST), where we will discuss the core project skills that are outlined in the guide, and why they’re essential for helping you do more with less. Register here.