Actionable Tips for Maximizing Project Efficiency

90% of projects are delivered late. This stat is often thrown around the project management sphere and sadly, projects do often miss their deadlines due to unforeseen circumstances, project changes, or a general lack of efficiency and planning.

While this stat isn’t true for every company, it’s universally true that, as project managers, we strive to be more efficient, more productive, and to deliver higher quality work to our clients.

With this in mind, here are some actionable tips you can use to maximize project efficiency.

1. Take a top-heavy approach to planning.

In the scramble to be efficient, it’s easy to make the mistake of diving in head-first before you’ve made an all-encompassing plan.

However, the more work you put into planning, the more efficient the rest of the process will be – and the less you’ll be held up by bottlenecks, backtracking, and uncertainty in the team.

Here are the three main components to tackle.

a. Project plan

Begin by outlining the goals and objectives of the project, moving on to making a list of every deliverable required for the project’s completion, and every task necessary to create those deliverables.

You’ll also want to note down key deadlines, assign roles and responsibilities to your team members, and highlight where you might need to bring in contractors.

This will ensure that you know, in advance, who you’ll need to complete the project, helping you to avoid project bottlenecks when waiting for resources to become available.

b. Project schedule

Building on the foundation of a solid project plan, you can now create the most efficient project schedule to bring your project to completion.

With a roster of all the activities you need to create the deliverables, you can arrange them into the optimal schedule to complete your project efficiently.

Things you should prioritise when creating the most efficient project schedule:

• Dependencies – many of the tasks required for project completion will need to be done in a particular order (a.k.a. to start some tasks, others will need to be completed first). Note all these dependencies and make this the foundation of your schedule to avoid bottlenecks and increase efficiency.
• Availability of resources – certain team members or contractors may only be available at certain times. Make sure to check in with your people and schedule tasks according to when they’re available to complete them.
• Overburden – when you finally arrange tasks into a project schedule, you may find that there are some team members that have too much on their plate. Or they might be responsible for several tasks that need to be completed in a similar time frame. In both cases, it’s a good idea to re-delegate to ensure project completion efficiency.

c. Risk management plan

Dealing with risks that turn into tangible problems is a huge drain on your team’s time. However, you can minimize the time lost to realized risk by preparing effectively.

Consider the risks that have the potential to impact your project and come up with a mitigation strategy to deal with each efficiently. It’s a good idea to assign owners to track and mitigate risks so that no time is wasted in responding to them.

2. Make use of your team

The benefit of being part of a team is that you have several brains to work with, rather than one.

Getting several of your team members involved with processes such as listing out all tasks and deliverables will help you to complete your project plan more quickly, so work on tangible deliverables can begin faster, too.

Brainstorming the kinds of risks you might encounter – and developing the risk management strategies to tackle them – is an activity similarly improved by teamwork, with people’s different experiences adding significant value to this process.

In short, any area where several heads are better than one – such as brainstorming and problem solving – should use your several members of your team to tackle it.

3. Arrange regular check-ins with stakeholders

As we’ve already touched upon, ‘backtracking’ – in other words, having to redo work you’ve already done – is a significant contributor to project delays and reduced efficiency.

One surefire way to reduce the amount of backtracking you do is to regularly check in with your clients – for example, once a week.

You can show them the latest versions of the tasks/deliverables to check you’re on track to execute their vision – or you’ll be able readjust quickly if they have something different in mind.

Share your plans for the upcoming week so that your client can interject if they have additional information or a change request to propose at a particular step. Again, preventing backtracking as much as possible to maximize efficiency.

4. Make communication regular and accessible

To be at your most efficient, your team needs to know exactly what needs to be done and when, what others have already done, and to be able to get in touch with team members and collaborators quickly.

In general, collaborative working/messaging tools are better than emailing, since they allow many team members to communicate at once, rather than individually. This makes it easier to work as a team – teamwork, as we highlighted above, is key to improving project efficiency.

It can also be a good idea to have regular team meetings to ensure everyone is on track. When there’s any confusion, or there are any big changes or events that take place, it’s often more effective and efficient to realign everyone at once, in person.