7 Reasons Why is Project Management is Important?

December 28, 2022 Stan

Often clients will ask: Why is project management important? Can’t we just brief the team doing the work and manage them ourselves?

They usually start asking these questions when they see the cost of a PM in their contracts.

The truth is, running projects without good project management is a false economy. It’s often thought to be an unnecessary burden on the budget, and there’s no doubt it can be expensive – as much as 20% of the overall project budget. Without it, what holds the team and client together? And without it, who is left to navigate through the ups and downs, clashes, and catastrophes of projects?

Great project management means much more than keeping project management’s iron triangle in check, delivering on time, budget, and project scope; it unites clients and teams, creates a vision for a successful project, and gets everyone on the same page of what’s needed to stay on track for success. When projects are managed properly, there’s a positive impact that reverberates beyond the delivery of ‘the stuff’.

Here is a list from my experience of why Project Management is important:

1. Strategic Alignment – ensures what is being delivered, is right, and will deliver real value against the business opportunity.

2. Leadership – brings leadership and direction to projects, vision, motivation, removing roadblocks, coaching, and inspiring the team to do their best work. Project managers serve the team but also ensure clear lines of accountability. With a project manager in place, there’s no confusion about who’s in charge and in control of whatever’s going on in a project (especially if you’re using a RACI chart or other similar tools).

3. Clear Focus & Objectives – ensures there’s a proper plan for executing on strategic goals. PM’s drive the timely accomplishment of tasks, by breaking up a project into tasks for our teams.

4. Quality Control – ensures the quality of whatever is being delivered, consistently hits the mark providing quality output.

5. Risk Management – ensures risks are properly managed and mitigated against to avoid becoming issues. Project managers enforce processes and keep everyone on the team in line too because ultimately they carry responsibility for whether the project fails or succeeds.

6. Project Life “Oversight” – ensures a project’s progress is tracked and reported properly. This provides insights into the work that was completed and planned, the hours utilized and how they track against milestones, risks, assumptions, issues and dependencies, and any outputs of the project as it proceeds.

7. Managing and Learning from Success and Failure – learning from the successes and failures of the past. PM’s use retrospectives, lessons learned, or post-project reviews to consider what went well, what didn’t go so well, and what should be done differently for the next project.

In conclusion, the importance of Project Management brings a holistic and reassuring to all parties involved in the project. Without Project Management, teams and clients are exposed to chaotic management, unclear objectives, a lack of resources, unrealistic planning, high risk, poor quality project deliverables, projects going over budget and delivered late. Great project management matters because project managers with great training deliver success.

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