How Self-hosted Project Management Software Can Reduce Business Operational Cost

1. How Self-hosted Project Management Software Can Reduce Business Operational Cost Businesses are often faced with stiff challenges in maintaining the low project, operational costs, and increasing their profits. And rightly so! Sadly, that is not the case always. Running a profitable enterprise requires a lot of control around procurement, resource utilization, real estate costs, talent, technology costs, project management, travel expenses, marketing, R&D budgets, etc. The larger the organization, the greater the complexity w.r.t a diverse, dispersed, and global workforce, cultural implications, local government regulations as well as an equally complex organization hierarchy spanning multiple departments.

2. Each department has its own budget, strategic goals, and timelines to meet these goals. At any given time there are multiple initiatives, projects that are being undertaken by the various functions across the organization involving multiple teams both local and global. Thus having a handle on all of these projects across the organization is not an easy task by any means. It is just overwhelming! Imagine the workforce, efforts and cost you would need to constantly monitor and stay on top of all initiatives run in your company. No wonder, companies globally make conscious investments for multiple work management, collaboration, and productivity management tools for their teams. Brings Your Organization Together A project portfolio management tool is capable of handling all your strategic initiatives centrally. Your entire team is aboard a single platform for all its activities. The significant benefit of a project portfolio management tool is in its ability to track all initiatives under one roof. The decision-makers can access the progress of the key projects in real-time and track the performance of their business. At the same time, the project managers can easily highlight risks and issues that need immediate management attention and action. The management team can quickly identify any non-performing projects and act decisively in a timely manner. Thus saving efforts and costs on initiatives that have outlived their purpose or would not prove profitable as expected earlier. All these man-hours saved can be repurposed for other profitable pursuits.

3. Task Tracking Businesses are often faced with stiff challenges in maintaining low project & operational costs while increasing their profits. And rightly so! I love project management tools for a very basic reason – no matter the size and composition of your team. Right from the CEO to the freshman –It works! You can break down large initiatives into multiple projects, allocate resources to these individual projects and build a thorough work breakdown structure for seamless execution. Each and every team member has their roles cut out. Everyone knows what is expected of them, how their work impacts the work of their team members, and how crucial their deliverable is to the overall project goal. In other words, high accountability and ownership within the teams. Healthy competition to motivate and help each other win. Collaboration is easy, administrative delays are prevented and the job is done much faster. You deliver on time, with quality. Your customers are happy and you get paid faster. And as they say, when you have more output and less chaos, your profits rise. I.e. top dollars for your investment in a project management tool. Improved Time And Resource Management Time is money may be a cliché. But successful enterprises keep it at the core of their business vision and mission. Timing is crucial in your go-to-market strategy, in staying ahead of your competition and delivering your products and services to your customers when they need them. Also, your resources and their efforts are two of the largest cost buckets. When organizations think of minimizing cost – this is where they train their guns first! But what would you minimize and optimize if you do not know where to start?

4. Resource allocation, availability, utilization, and a thorough picture of your billable hours spent are a must to keep your projects and company profitable. How do you measure them without proper time tracking and resource utilization reports? Time tracking tools offer comprehensive measures to ● record hours spent by your resources on various activities ● categorize your spent hours neatly into billable and non-billable ● advanced task breakdown and classification to see what task types consume the maximum amount of your team’s time ● resource availability to maintain optimal workloads and prevent resource overload ● hourly rates report help see which resources are most effectively utilized and which aren’t Comprehensive-time and resource analytics, help you plan your resource requirements across the company. You have clarity around the number of new hires you would need to support existing as well as upcoming projects. This also helps to keep your organization agile and nimble with minimal to zero bench strength. With the right resource forecast and optimal resource utilization, you maximize billability on every hour spent by your resources. Thus, you have a lean operation team with more on-time results, better cost savings, and high revenue. Cost Savings From Multiple Tools & Licenses Large teams continue to work in silos and deploy tools of their own choice based on their individual needs. Not a good thing in the long run at all. Simply put, your teams are building chaos rather than preventing it. There is a very high chance that: ● multiple teams using multiple tools for the same purpose ● company’s data is on disparate sources ● no single source of truth

5. ● humongous efforts in synching the info from multiple platforms ● the duplicity of efforts and initiatives ● security is compromised as some tools may be on public cloud or SaaS offerings ● disconnected teams ● management doesn’t get a holistic overview of all initiatives ● technical debt and overhead in managing multiple apps ● tremendous IT expenditure ● a lot of vendor management Using multiple tools creates a lot of blind spots and you run a very high risk of lettings things fall through the cracks. Imagine, where you cannot present the true status of your projects to your management, and neither can they take the right decisions at the right time. The cost of which is just unimaginable!