The 5 Simple P's That Can Transform Your Startup

5 simple P's can transform your startup project management game right now.

Proper

Planning

Prevents

Poor

Performance

Here's how you do it:

Planning More Effectively As An Entrepreneur

If you are an idea person, you’re more likely to want to get going fast and hope that your business strategy will just fall into place as you go.

This is hardly ever how it really goes.

Being pragmatic and a good planner is more important during business building than the actual idea is.

But growing from a startup or mid-market company into a scale-up is a challenging transition even for experienced founders.

So how do they stay ahead?

The answer is proper planning through project management.

The Key To Successful Project Management

The best project managers know that you focus on some key internal principles to ensure the project becomes successful.

One of the things you can most easily work on is communication.

Regardless if you’re a project manager or if you’re the founder of your startup — it’s important for everyone to be on the same page.

That means everyone on your team needs to know the company mission statement and what you are all working towards.

It also includes things like jumping onto video calls, answering quick q's via Slack, and becoming a facilitator for idea creation.

How you plan communication and other approaches will depend on:

-The size of your team

-Upcoming deadlines

-Requirement constraints

-Number of projects

A startup, for example, has to plan properly to try and get a single venture off the ground and profitable.

A venture studio on the other hand needs to be able to plan to keep multiple simultaneous or subsequent ventures going - both for clients and their own internal apps/startups.

Jeff Bezos has a very good approach to this that is still used at Amazon despite how big it's grown.

It's called the 2-pizza model.

Using The 2-Pizza Model For New Ventures

Jeff Bezos still to this day will separate out new ventures into a team small enough to be fed by two pizzas.

The goal of this rule was to focus the team on efficiency and scalability.

The smaller the team, the less time the team spent on managing timetables to keep people informed and the more time doing what needs to be done.

If the efficiency is maintained then the team can spend thought power on scalability and product market fit.

Once proven to work it will be adopted company-wide.

This is another thing you can control: dividing up your plan of attack.

Have smaller teams each paired with their own project manager and let them report to you.

This prevents poor performance.

Remember: What gets measured gets managed

Why Reporting Is A Project Management Staple

Reporting will be key to staying on top of your project development.

Track and measure the work your team is doing, particularly if you want to work iteratively.

There is one more P that will help you as a founder: Prevention.

Prevention is the ultimate backup plan.

You can’t plan everything. This is just impossible. Especially as a startup. You never know what unexpected problem might pop up tomorrow.

But you can prevent them from having a large impact if you plan preventatively for things like:

-Running out of money

-Project non-delivery

-Times of crises

TL: DR proper planning in startups prevent poor performance, and these 5 preventative words can help you become a better project manager.