Project Management Strategies in the Recession

Project Management Strategies in the Recession
By Alexander Hankewicz

Below are some Project Management strategies that will strengthen businesses against the current recession:

The Pro-active Project Manager

The need for a Project Manager (PM) to be” business savvy”, especially during a recession, is critical. The PM will have to become a crusader, a salesperson, and an influencer to fight for projects that enhance productivity and quality, or that shorten cycle times, or that have a shorter project life cycle to generate return on investment (ROI). When the economic cycle turns upward again—as it inevitably does—having invested in the improvement of quality and cycle time, within both manufacturing and product distribution, may result in a higher market share for a product. Once management has examined business processes as a way to bring about improvements, other areas of an organization’s infrastructure can be open for examination as well. The methodology that supports project management can be used in areas such as product design, by examining all aspects of a product’s features and benefits. This may result in improvements to product features unlike any of the competition’s product offerings, thus generating higher revenues for the organization.

Lean Strategies to Weather the Storm

1. Innovate to promote knowledge exchange by encouraging team-building and collaborative efforts through relationships with coworkers and vendors.
2. Generate competition among internal teams working toward to continous improvements.
3. Don’t cut back on meetings. Meetings for brainstorming and to fire up team members’ creativity are more important than ever when companies downsize.
4. Build new teams. Business pullbacks are excellent times to pursue new ideas and projects and to get them on the drawing board.?
5. Don’t insulate team members by cutting travel. Get them out in the world and exposed to new thinking. Send teams to trade shows and webinars, and encourage networking through associations, all to review costs with an eye toward eliminating unnecessary expenditures.
6. Introduce new technologies, such as business intelligence (BI) and enterprise resource planning (ERP), which will generate savings and add analytical visibility.

For more information on PPM and vendors that offer PPM solutions, please visit TEC’s Project Portfolio Management Evaluation Center (http://ppm.technologyevaluation.com/). You can also read white papers, vendor comparisons, and articles that discuss documented improvements organizations have made.

Reproduced with the expressed permission of Technology Evaluation Centers Inc. Copyright © 2009 Technology Evaluation Centers Inc.

Alexander Hankewicz is a Senior Business Analyst at Technical Evaluation Centers.
He has over fifteen years of I.T. Management Experience in the area of Supply Chain Management Systems, Business Process Re-Engineering, Vendor Management and Project Management for enterprise wide systems for a variety of Fortune 500 Companies Including H.P. Sony Ericsson, Nortel, and Perkins Elmer He has written numerous articles and can be reached at ahankewicz@tec-centers.com.