Two focuses of my blog are Financial Literacy/Money and Business/Entrepreneurship. When you’re an entrepreneur, you have to figure out how to manage your multiple projects effectively. This one component will set you apart from you competition. The following contributed post is entitled, How Does Agile Project Management Help Entrepreneurs?
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It’s no surprise that entrepreneurs are always on the lookout for better methods to help their businesses grow. While some would pin this search down as nothing more than a greener pasture, many entrepreneurs turn to Agile Project Management (APM) specifically due to its growth-oriented approach and proven results.
APM allows business owners like you to spend less time managing employees and more time growing your business. Let’s look at how APM works and how it might be able to make your life easier.
As with any method of management, there are varying levels that one can take in applying these principles. By understanding the different main ideas behind APM, you’ll be able to choose which methods work best for you and your team.
The three main ideas behind APM are:
1) increased project visibility,
2) ongoing stakeholder engagement and other related benefits, and
3) optimized team and organizational performance.
These ideas together provide a framework for how your business should function, as well as the goals you would like it to achieve.
Based upon these principles, we’ll discuss some of the key features of APM that make it highly useful for entrepreneurs such as yourself:
1) Higher Productivity Rates:
APM eliminates much of the wasteful bureaucracy that surrounds traditional project management by organizing business activities around prioritized backlogs rather than rigid schedules. This makes it so teams are only responsible for an iteration at a time, allowing them to focus fully upon each requirement in order to create a higher-quality product with less effort. Given that your employees will likely be more satisfied and feel better supported, this is bound to lead to greater levels of productivity.
2) Greater Collaboration between Employees:
As mentioned earlier, APM encourages increased collaboration among all individuals involved in any given business activity by ensuring everyone’s efforts are based on shared goals. Each work item has its own backlog, which can be modified by other team members, allowing for greater engagement and synergy. This not only makes it easier to manage workflow but also increases the speed at which tasks are completed due to an open exchange of ideas.
3) Improved Customer Service:
By engaging stakeholders in a more regular fashion during each iteration, APM allows your team to better understand the needs of your customers and tailor your products accordingly. Not only will you be able to offer faster turnaround times on customer requests because changes can be made more readily, but you’ll also receive feedback from them much sooner. In addition, by providing regular updates about your progress throughout development cycles, you create additional opportunities for dialogue between yourself and clients.
4) Shorter Development Timescales:
Traditional project management tends to mismanage and overestimate development timelines due to a lack of ongoing engagement between clients and developers. APM, however, facilitates an ongoing dialogue between all involved parties by breaking down tasks into small pieces so they can be completed more quickly. This allows you to better assess the true scope of work required on any given task or project before beginning it, which is managed according to priority rather than a schedule.
5) Better Work/Life Balance for Staff Members:
Keeping your employees happy during their time off from your company is key in retaining them long-term. By working with a shared backlog that anyone can add items to at any time, everyone has a say in what gets seized for a given release or iteration. This allows individuals to select those tasks they feel most passionate about and work toward them as a team instead of the solitary nature of the traditional approach.
In Closing
By taking advantage of these benefits, entrepreneurs can improve efficiency while cutting costs at the same time, thus leaving more money in their wallets once the project is complete.
