Home » Business & Finance » Small Business » Projects

Projects

© Bert Markgraf

Generally the activities of businesses can be divided into two types: there are the on-going activities of running the business and then there are projects. Projects are distinguished from on-going activities by being one-of-a-kind tasks, generally to do with business expansion or with the installation of equipment or facilities. Most small businesses do not handle projects well because they don't have the expertise required.

The key to successful projects is planning. The more detailed your planning, the better prepared you are and the more problems can be anticipated and potential solutions explored. One of the best ways to plan for projects is to use time-based analysis. You simply approach the project step by step, put everything in sequence and assign the amount of time required for each task. You end up with the tasks and their duration strung out along a line representing the duration of the project. This method is called time-line based and it is ideal for projects which have a large number of activities more or less in sequence.

Other projects have their activities running mainly in parallel. This is especially true when there are a large number of teams or suppliers who have to do their work simultaneously and then assemble the final product together. For such projects you can still use a time line but, to get the effects of tasks running simultaneously, you can create horizontal bars which represent a task with the length of the bar being its planned duration. You can now arrange these bars horizontally over your time line and overlap them as required. When tasks are not completed in time, you can modify the length of the corresponding bars and immediately get a feel for what the impact on the overall project will be.

Charts such as these used to be done manually but now software makes the creation and the up-dating of such charts easy and quick so that project planning is much less time-consuming and easier to do in great detail. This link takes you to a page which has details on a number of different software programs for project management. They are useful for any kind of project, whether it is an expansion of your building or the setting up of a new computer network. If you're good at your business, you're probably not good at such projects because you haven't had the time to spend on learning such skills. The least you can do is get good software to make the job of managing such projects easier and to make it possible to plan with the kind of detail necessary to make the project a success.