Efficiency and Effectiveness in Project Management

Are you managing your project efficiently, effectively, or both? Are you Doing Things Right, Doing Right Things, or doing both? What a project manager is doing throughout the entire lifecycle of her project is increasing efficiency and effectiveness in principle.

Going back to the ABCs of management, management is defined as planning, organizing, leading, and controlling resources (human and other resources) to achieve organizational goals. This definition implies both increasing efficiency and effectiveness.

Manage with Efficiency

Efficiency measures how well and productively a manager uses her resources to achieve goals. Project management places a heavy focus on how to acquire the right project team to perform project tasks and to close project successfully within the agreed constraints. For example, in Human Resource Planning the project manager proactively boosts efficiency by deciding on the Organizational Structure and Roles and Responsibilities to complete project tasks. Then, when she later acquires the project team, she obtains the right human resources according to the Roles and Responsibilities, and she decides on any training needs they may require to complete their tasks.

The project manager should keep an eye on Resource Availability. Are resources overallocated? Is the Resource Usage curve smooth? She uses Resource Leveling as a tool to increase efficiency by eliminating overallocation of resources. Hence, she keeps almost constant or smooth use of resources throughout the span of the project lifecycle. When it comes to the Monitoring & Controlling phase the project manager tries to increase efficiency by resolving conflicts that may arise within the project team. A thorough review of her team’s performance is required so as to enhance the overall performance of the project.

Manage with Effectiveness

On the other hand, Effectiveness measures the alignment of project goals to those pursued by the organization as well as the degree of achieving them. Scope Management is a critical area that ensures alignment and completion of project goals without derailment from either organizational goals or initial project scope.

Building and measuring effectiveness in a project starts when the scope is defined during Planning phase (Scope Management Plan, Scope Statement, and the Work Breakdown Structure-WBS). Scope is built around goals and end-deliverables the customer or sponsor mandates.

A solid Scope Change procedure is compiled during the Scope Planning process. Through this procedure the scope of the project is kept under control throughout the entire lifecycle. At the end of each phase, and before moving to the next phase, the PM verifies the deliverables of the phase against the scope baseline to check whether the agreed scope is being met and to verify that the entire project is still appropriate and in line with the overall strategies of the company or the customer.

As a result of this continuous control over scope corrective and preventive actions are taken to keep the project focused on the original plan or to update the plan itself to cope with the ultimate goals pursued by the customer or the sponsor.

If you think of efficiency and effectiveness this way you will find that these two measures are pivotal in the project management profession. Not only do they apply to the cases mentioned above, but also to all project baselines-Scope, Cost, Time, Quality, Human Resources, and Risk.

Can you think of other tasks a project manager undertakes during the lifecycle of her project that end up in enhancing Efficiency and Effectiveness metrics? Post your ideas in the comment box.