It is painful to explain obvious benefits of project management. Making project more efficient sounds too generic. Moreover, can you prove that?

And the most powerful argument from the opposite side:

”It has been working this way for years. Why would we need to change anything?”

I get it. It is frustrating.

I have a solution for you. A score of compelling arguments that will work for different people in project lifetime. You can use and adapt them during your next session to prove the benefits of project management.

One side note. It not a one-time effort. Don’t flush all the argument at once. Analyze your stakeholders and select the most appealing ones.

Here we go!

1. One Responsible Person for Project Success

It is the most crucial benefit of project management. There is always only one responsible person for everything. It is project manager.

A project team cannot keep up with commitments. Stakeholders do not want to collaborate. Requirements are not clear. In the long run, it is a failure of a project manager.

With an ability to escalate any problem to the required level, a PM can handle any situation.

If you are not ready to take personal responsibility and ownership for project success, the rest doesn’t really matter.

2. One Point of Communication

As a stakeholder, you will find it comfortable to have only one person to communicate with. Everything goes in and out of a project via PM. You don’t need to search for a responsible team member to get an update. You won’t overload a person and mess up the schedule by assigning a task to a wrong person.

3. Mediation of Interests of Many Stakeholders

As a Sponsor or a top manager, you know that many people will be influenced and will want to benefit from a project. Many people will want to contribute or participate in the project for a variety of reasons.

You can rest assured that project manager will find a mutually beneficial balance in requirements that are aligned with the project and strategic goals.

4. Improved Customer Satisfaction

As a customer, you will work with the project manager on a daily basis. The project manager can be your best business partner.

Why?

He owns an ultimate responsibility for your project’s success. You are the only person who can outline success criteria. The project manager is the only person who can adjust your expectations to your budget and timelines.

5. Scalable Project Complexity

A Sponsor or Customer may face a situation when there is a need for a small effort first. A prototype or a proof of concept. If it appears to be successful, then you will want to launch the work at a full swing.

Project Management allows scaling work to any size and complexity.

A project manager can select appropriate tools, methodologies, and techniques. It will scale not only the manpower but also the required processes to control and monitor the project progress.

6. Unified Approach to Leading a Project

In conjunction with the previous point. Sponsor or Customer may find it useful that it is possible to lead projects different in nature under the same project management approach.

You need to develop a software application, a printed manual, create a training course and plan and release event. No problem, a project manager can handle everything within the scope of one project.

It is not magic. You will have to provide relevant resources.

7. Established Team Ownership

As a customer or a client, ask yourself the following:

Do you want people (that you pay for) to put their souls and hearts into your product or service?

Do you want to get access to the full potential of engineers or designers in the project team?

If yes, then proper project management is built around handing off the ownership for the project to each team member. While project manager aligns them towards the project goal, people put their best to deliver the best results possible.

8. Improved Efficiency of Resource Allocation

As a Stakeholder, you will want to ensure that someone has enough knowledge about all the work, it’s complexity, and required skills to get it done.

Moreover, you may have rare and expensive experts in the company. It is essential to use each hour of their work for the most crucial tasks.

Project managers create resource allocation plans.

9. Proof of Estimates

As a Client and Sponsor, you want to understand where the money, time, and resources go.

Project Management implies working within given constraints. Therefore, there are a lot of tools and techniques to create accurate and transparent estimates.

A project manager can create a Work Breakdown Structure. She can provide you with a decomposition of the whole project scope. After that, she can make a bottom-up estimation.

10. Collaboration on Any Level

As a stakeholder, you will want to empower your project team with expertise from other domains. A good project manager is capable of building the bridges in different dimensions.

It gets handy when you need feedback from engineers for your marketing campaigns. Or when you need them all to cooperate with design studio. And any other combinations.

Moreover, it can all work under one framework.

11. Proactive Risk Management

As a Stakeholder or Sponsor, you do want to get a resilient project management plan. It should hold the punch of uncertainties and changing environment.

Risk management techniques will help you to identify and proactively fight the impact of an adverse event.

12. Team Development

“What if we teach them and they leave…”

As an owner of a company, you want to have the best experts. You can spend a fortune and hire them. Or you can teach and develop them from talented people.

Project management is not only about the work. It also takes into account short-term and long-term needs of a company. A project manager builds-in training and development programs for team members to make them more efficient.

It is one of the best motivators in any industry.

13. Motivated People

Everyone should be interested in having motivated people onboard. Moreover, you need them happy with work they do for an extended period of time.

It is not enough to motivate your team to finish a project. After that, there will be another project. Entirely possible that it will be another manager.

Any stakeholder will want to ensure people get from one assignment to another in a good mood.

14. Perfect Environment for Project Work

As a team member, you would be glad to have clear expectations, the scope of work planned ahead, and little distraction.

Also, you will want to know your impact on the project. And you want to do the work that matches your skill set and career development plans.

15. Efficient Reporting

As a stakeholder, you will benefit from reporting system that a project manager prepared in advance.

Moreover, it goes hand in hand with having a clear and transparent Project Management Plan. You will have an ability to compare what was promised with actual results.

16. Flexibility of Approaches

As a client, if the customer you will be happy to switch frameworks to the ones that suit the needs the most.

First, you may want a plan-driven execution to optimise resources allocation. Later you may want to switch to Kanban to address defects in a controlled way. Then you may want to start a new project with Scrum.

17. Predictable Outcome

One of the main reasons Project Management exists is improved predictability of outcomes.

As a stakeholder of any level, you will want to have milestones and deadlines to plan strategically. You will need to know budget. What’s more important you need guarantees for desired results.

18. Reduced Sink Costs

As a Sponsor, you may save lots of money.

An experienced Project Manager knows well how to identify the changes for success. If they are low, he must insist on terminating the project.

19. Simplified Project Progress Controls

As a Customer, you need the ability to control the project progress. To do that, you need a profound reporting system that will provide actionable information.

Many other mentioned benefits contribute to this one. All in all, a project manager will point out decision that you need to make. Additionally, you will have an efficient way to introduce changes to the project.

20. Clearly Defined Project Scope

As a Customer, you want to know what needs to be done to deliver the requirements you provided.

It helps to control project estimates

It gives transparency to the team’s work

You get a better understanding of quality of your requirements

21. Built-in Quality

In Project Management, quality is a function of all constraints. You will always get a high-quality project of the required grade. On the other hand, you will know if it is impossible to do that within given constraints.

22. Prevention of Defects

As a Customer or Sponsor, you do want to get a quality product, service or result from the first try.

Project Management is aimed at improving efficiency. Preventing defects is the most efficient way to deliver quality results. So, that is how a project should be planned.

23. Continuous Improvement

As a Client, Customer, or company owner, you may have a long project or a sequence of projects. You would want to benefit from the experience your team acquires.

Also, you don’t want to make the same mistakes again. Each next project should be more cost efficient.

24. Professional Problem Solving

You get a person who holds ultimate responsibility for the project success. In addition to that, you get a person most interested in solving problems and removing impediments.

25. Thorough Conflict Resolution

As a team member or a stakeholder, you don’t want conflicts to stay unresolved for long. Even more, you don’t want them to be smooth or forced. Otherwise, the dissatisfaction will pile up.

A Project Manager is interested in finding mutually beneficial solutions. Professionals also keep track of all the conflicts and resolutions.

26. Actionable Forecasts

Risks, assumptions, and uncertainties are a part of any project. In the course of planning and execution, more clarity will come. Project Management can help to ensure that team assesses changes in knowledge. It can provide valuable information on whether we should continue the project.

Found this article useful? Please share it on LinkedIn!