The cycles of expansion and contraction are part of every business climate. Anticipating those cycles and quickly acting on opportunities separate good companies from vulnerable ones. Currently, many companies are facing a cost cutting environment.
Effective managers will seek out growth opportunities and limit costs in order to gain market share and ultimately achieve profitability. In assessing the way projects are completed within organizations, companies have a variety of options available to manage their workload. They can hire and manage project management personnel as employees or outsource the work as a less costly alternative for phased deployment. Hiring employees is expensive as the company can expect to pay an average PM salary of at least $60,000 plus an additional 50% in benefits, workspace and telecommunication costs. Project managers are often relied upon to develop their own processes to run their projects with other employees. Teams become dependent on a single point of contact to proceed and will often get into bottleneck situations. Too often, companies are mired in inefficient processes with ineffective employees who act as productivity drains. The competition hopes to capitalize on those situations.
Hiring external contractors contains additional hidden costs associated with "lost in translation" hourly fee adjustments. Contract re-negotiation often relies on the leverage of deadline date. These hard costs are easy to identify on a spreadsheet.
Another option would be to automate the business processes via web services and train teams to work collaboratively - essentially sharing the work evenly through many people. Not so easy to identify on a spreadsheet is how to use existing resources more efficiently via time management.
PlanDone offers the best of both worlds by giving project managers an option to make their job running teams much easier and more efficient, and it allows executives to save further costs getting more bang for the buck using a hosted software as a service solution. PlanDone's customers have both increased their top line and decreased their bottom line by working smarter not harder to achieve personal and professional goals.
