Productivity and efficiency are the two things that every business strives for. They are the ideal of all production – whether you are creating products or offering services to your clients. However, these two are often at odds. One might even argue that they are the opposite, even competing forget. Simply put, you can get the productivity you want – when you reduce efficiency, and similarly, you can work with more efficiency but at the cost of productivity.

It is the job of a project manager to reconcile these two together. They are the people whose job it is to find a balance between them and work together with the team to keep this balance. Luckily, you can do this in many ways. The world of business and technology is constantly improving, and nowadays there are many milestones and deliverables examples you can look into that can greatly help you. Today, we look at some of the most important factors that you need to keep in mind as an improving project manager.

First, let’s examine the definitions of productivity and efficiency

In order to better understand a term, first, we need to define it. Without a clear definition, we leave a lot of room for confusion which is something you should strive to avoid – especially in your team. Luckily, productivity is easy enough to define. It is the quantity of your work – whatever this may be. You can monitor the number of happy customers, or the number of finished products – it depends on your business.

Efficiency, however, is a bit trickier. This is because it is connected to your resources and can vary depending on which resource you prioritize. This is why you can be efficient with your raw resources, your budget – but most often, what you are looking into is time.

Still, the main goal of every business is to achieve the best quality of products and service with the fewest resources possible. And this is where the challenge appears. To achieve this, you need careful planning and organizing your resources. Luckily, you can do it with plenty of useful tools and software!

Find a way to track efficiency that works for you

The first thing you will want to do is to find a good way to track your progress. Productivity is, yet again, easy to follow. All you need to do is count your target. However, efficiency proves difficult yet again. This is because, while resources are easy to track, the time your time spends developing a project isn’t.

However, the salvation comes in the form of one of the many tools we mentioned. All you really need to do is find a good project management software! Tools like Nifty Project Management can greatly help you track the time you and your team spend on important tasks.

What’s more, tools like there are also very useful when it comes to tracking progress of the team and assigning tasks and resources for each task. This way, with some smart tools, you will be able to track, monitor, and influence both the productivity and the efficiency of your team.

Automatize the process to boost your efficiency

One of the main ways in which you can boost your efficiency is by automatizing the way you deal with your tasks. Luckily, this is not that hard to do. All you need to do is take note of the things that you do manually. This process takes up a lot of your resources – even if you do not notice it. What’s more, you can save up a lot on them if you simply let technology take care of it.

To do this correctly, though, you need a good setup. Just like you cannot build a house without a good foundation, so does your project workflow cannot function without proper organization put in place beforehand. And to keep this workflow running, you need amazing team communication.

The importance of team collaboration

Team collaboration and good team communication is the key to successful project management. Without a good team, there isn’t much that you can really do! When they are communicating well and collaborating in the right way, they can take charge in some tasks, which reduces the pressure on your resources. 

What’s more, this means that you can allocate more of your time and resources to other tasks, which in turn boosts productivity. So, with a flawless team collaboration, you are able to tip both scales at the same time!

Conversely, having a team with bad communication will only make things difficult. You will have to work through the project instead of them, and this takes up important resources. In turn, you get low productivity and low efficiency, which is a lose-lose situation! 

To conclude, in order to gain on both efficiency and productivity, make sure you there is a perfect collaboration in your team. Tools that we mentioned will allow you to both track your resources and keep communication channels in your team open, so think carefully about investing in them to further your company’s improvement.

About the author:
Content writer at Nifty, the leader in project management tools. Petar Djordjevic is always working on improving his online writing skills, as well as learning about content optimization and ways to boost website users’ experience. In the meantime, he is studying Mathematics and hoping to become a professional novel writer.