WHY SMART IS SO IMPORTANT IN PROJECT AND BUSINESS MANAGEMENT
Creating a successful and profitable business takes time. Yes, it is Time and the trust build over time for your project or business. Neither marketing nor growth strategy could help it grow as fast as the trust that customers have for your business or project.
There is no guarantee set of rules to make a project or business successfully. Here are some ideas to guide you to initiate successfully business or project management.
For a business to survive in the first three years, you need to carefully use a SMART strategy to start and grow your business or project. Just take it easy, the below narrative is not the SMART guideline, a common one as you used to know, just take time to read. It will help you with your business or project to grow SMART and successful.
Start SMALL
Yes, as you start there will be a lot of demands and needs in the market but focus on specific services or products you can offer to the market. Define your market segment or target group of people or community. There a lot of benefits of working on a small scale and grow your business within a niche with specialization.
To establish a business line or project in not for Profit sector requires proper field and desk work to identify gaps and establish values in which can easily alternative separate your business from the competition.
To engage in specific services or sector will help you to stand out from a crowd very fast and help to manage business or project management stress. If you look within your areas of focus and interest you would find a lot of Startups or growing business or projects that are hardly managing their business or project just because their project or business is too general and want to do everything and try to be everywhere.
Market It
For the business and project in Not for Profit (NFP) the common goals for marketing are to; Increase traffic, Increase email subscribers and Increase customers. Marketing is very important in every stage of business or project, from inception to scaling the project or business. Every marketing strategy has to do just one goal, but there are many goals it depends on the industry or the size of the business.
Marketing can be of intensive budget and once you go for consultants they will share huge maybe eight figures marketing strategy. But just keep it simple, take the advantages of social media but as it suggests, social media so you need to be social as well while working on your marketing strategy. Always remember, Trend is a friend, this would help you to assess the social trend and try to connect your business or project campaign in that direction, but you can look for experts’ advice once you want to use social trends on marketing.
Take the advantage of social media tools like Twitter and Facebook are wonderful ways to get your message, increasing outreach, and traffic (social engagement). Social media is not only more cost-efficient than advertising, but it also offers great opportunities for innovative engagement with your customers and to stay in touch with the community around you. Engage and use it to your advantage. Make the use of human center design and stories and storytelling techniques in the marketing of your business or project.
Be Accountable
Project or business management requires the ability to check and balance the resources that make the project or business to move and produce the required values. Make sure you give the project or business manager the power and tools to take into account the quality and quantity of Human resources, stocks, working facilities, and all necessary infrastructures to make your project or business grow successfully.
Accountability builds trust. Perhaps the most important result of accountability is trust, which is essential in any relationship. Being accountable to something means that you’re willing to make commitments and be responsible for your own actions. This promotes trust between you and the people around you. It is very important to know that you are accountable to your customers, clients and also to your beneficiaries. But most often we normally focus the accountability checks to just donors.
RE-Everything in Business or Project Management
Reflect; “Reflection” is something we don’t usually allow ourselves to experience because we are too busy getting on to the next task at hand, too busy hurrying to the next assignment that we don’t pay attention fully to what we have created in the last assignment, too busy grappling with the next hurdle because it is there rather than analyzing why we felt a certain way about our work just completed. I found the best article which explains how is it important to do reflection, you can read more about reflection here.
Rethinking new strategies; sometimes it is not about good documents developed by competent experts but again the environment in which we are operating is changing significantly. Better to rethink the strategies that may fit the current environment to stay competitive to the market and to offer needed services to communities. Yes, long term strategies are a good idea but not enough to guarantee business or project growth successfully.
Re-launch your campaign either marketing or social behavior change campaign just after you do analytical work and you identified gaps, you can redesign your campaign and relaunch again.
Revisit your plans, strategies and all issues related to your business and project management. Once you have a detailed implementation plan, don’t hit the ground running without to check your seat belt, check your fuel gauge and visit your clients, communities to ensure that you are still relevant to them, you are working in the right direction and you have the right team.
Time and Technology
Time is a very valuable asset in the project or business management. Make sure you check on the timeline of the project plan or the business. In the Business Plan time is considered very careful during the assessment of the factors of production which also may affect the pricing and marketing of the product or services.
Consider the time when you design the service or product and in non-profit organizations make sure you check the calendar well so that you can meet the donor timeline for reporting, and activities implementation, and also during fundraising or resource mobilization.
When you start with a project, the initial task is to have a top-level plan. Once that is done, you often move on to preparing the detailed list of activities and incorporate them into your project plan. Now comes the part where resources are allocated to these activities. During the course of your project, modifications to the activities and resources can happen on a regular basis. Often, one resource will be working on more than one project and tracking of time spent on different activities is vital in many ways.
On top of all you do, kindly embrace technology. There is a great innovation that you can apply to save time and be more effective in delivering your value to clients and partners and manage the successful growth of your business or project. In financial management applies tools such as QuickBooks, a tally that will help to produce quickly report just on a single click, can easily manage payroll and also manage the financial details of the project or business transaction easily.
The same can be applied to data management in the project implementation. To conduct a baseline survey ( Consider tool such as SW Maps ), client feedback and monitoring and evaluation just apply technology that can help to save time and increase efficiency in the project or business management.
Note on Time; the time spent on activities will also come in handy when there is a need for prioritizing an activity or project over another. Moreover, the proper time entry enables the project manager to see that the time is not exceeding the estimated time, and well in advance to mitigate the risks. Effective time tracking helps also the resources, in order to keep track of their normal work time as well as the overtime they have put in. Without additional steps, human resource personnel could check the overtime of the resource and compensate for that.
In business, timing is significant to ensure that services or product designed launched on time when clients, customers can see the value and decide to purchase it. Otherwise early to launch or late to introduce the service or product to the market have direct implications to your business growth.
Yes, it is just simple as SMART
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