Task List
PRIORITIZATION – PROJECT MANAGEMENT PLAN
Your Small Business Startup Project Can Benefit from a Project Management Approach
Ease of Management, Timely Completion and Lower Costs Are the Major Benefits
Your small business startup project can gain such benefits as timely completion and lower costs if you adopt a project management approach to go.
You have completed your business plan outlining what you need to establish - facilities, marketing and administration setups, financing plan, professional networking groups and any other key aspect. You now have to get your business going at the earliest. You can go about it in an unsystematic way, doing things in a rather unorganized manner, or go about it in a systematic way, using proven project management techniques.
Identify and Prioritize All the Tasks Involved
Key tasks, such as developing a business plan and then implementing it, will involve many detailed activities. The first function of project management is to list these detailed activities. In a project of any size, there will be thousands of such detailed activities. It would be impossible to attend to all these unless you go about it in a systematic manner.
You would generally go about it in the following manner:
- Categorize the activities into meaningful groups
- Prioritize the activity groups in a natural sequence
- Now look at the activities included in each group. Which activities need to be completed in full or in part before other activities can be taken up?
- Sequence the activities in each group in a correct order on the basis of their interdependencies
- Set time targets for starting and completing each activity and activity group, and check whether these targets would ensure that the overall project would be completed by the desired date
- Prepare daily and weekly to-do lists to ensure that scheduled activities and activity groups are started and finished as planned (or earlier). These to-do lists might include both significant and trivial tasks required to complete activities.
- Carry out the tasks in the to-do lists
- Strike off completed tasks from the to-do lists, and add new tasks that might come up while attending to the activities in the list
- Make a daily review of the progress being achieved, and identify any shortfalls that are likely to delay the completion of the project
- Take necessary actions to remedy the situation if any shortfalls are anticipated or noticed
The success of the process described above would depend on how complete your plans and activity lists are. If they are complete, the above process will result in completing your small business startup project successfully and in a timely manner.
Identify Resource Requirements and Organize the Resources
Activities need entrepreneurial resources. The resource required can be nothing more than your time; or it could involve physical resources in different forms, such as equipment, skilled persons or materials, for example. Physical resources typically need financial resources to organize, in addition to time.
Your business plan would have given you an idea of the kind and extent of resources you need. You would now have to look at your immediate requirements and start organizing what is needed. Where organizing a resource is a long-term process, such as importing machinery from abroad, you would have to initiate needed actions sufficiently in advance. You must ensure that the resource is available by the time it would be needed.
Organizing entrepreneurial resources typically requires some kind of interaction with other people. In such cases, you would have to get hold of the people concerned. Sometimes this could involve getting prior appointments. At other times, it might involve nothing more than picking up the phone and talking to the person.
When you are working with other people, you would need people skills to get desired results. Additionally, it might involve a lot of follow up before results appear.
Use Project Management Tools to Help You
There are many project management tools, both computer-based and manual ones, in the market. By using these tools, you would find it easier to keep track of things and activities. For example, if you have placed an order for some equipment, the system can generate alerts when due date for delivery approaches. This would enable you to take any follow up action, if necessary.
A tool like the MS Project will allow you to list activities, resource requirements, target dates and so on. More advanced tools like PERT/CPM software would enable you to manage very complex projects.
