In this industry, growth doesn’t always happen slowly. 

Often it happens right after taking on a huge new project. You look around and realise you’ve grown beyond recognition, practically overnight.

Plenty of opportunities come with this. 

But so do challenges, including:

•  Procedures that worked for you as a small business will no longer cut it.
•  The need to create, retain and maintain more records than ever.
•  Having to wrangle data across a lot of separate platforms. 
•  Required tracking of multiplying staff members, equipment and assets.

Any growing business is going to go through this. The question is: 

How do you grab control and make the transition as smooth and painless as possible? 

The key to successful expansion is addressing inefficiencies as early as possible.

This can include rostering and inductions, locating information and records, onboarding new staff, reporting, and actually completing work.

A major cause of these issues is that many smaller companies don't have an integrated managment system

By that, I mean that most businesses have separate systems for accounting, WHS, inductions, HR etc. None of these platforms are linked, so connecting any of this information becomes a cumbersome, manual task.

The fact is: when a business gets bigger, project management simply needs to change.

Building a growth-proof project management system: 3 questions to ask

Okay, so you’ve realised your systems aren’t keeping up with your growth. Now what?

A successful strategy is to figure out what you’re trying to achieve and then identify the barriers that stand in your way. 

In order to get started here are 3 crucial questions to ask yourself:

Question 1: ‘Am I trying to attain accreditation?’

Say your business is going so well that you would like to tender for a major Vic Roads project that has come up.

With this new business capability comes new requirements and with new requirements comes necessary accreditations.

For this or any similar expansion you’ll need an efficient asset management capability that can link inductions and accreditation to your new equipment.

Question 2: ‘Do I need to improve my resource scheduling?’

Is all of your scheduling, equipment stocktake, and asset management running smoothly? If you’re relying on paper-based processes and whiteboards, then probably not.

Analysing what you really need out of resource scheduling is vital.

For example, you should asses how much you need:

• The ability to organise and roster your resources
• GPS tracking to help you maintain visibility of your assets
• Knowledge of which staff are qualified to use specific equipment.

Question 3: ‘What are my management system requirements?’

This is the big one — figuring out to what extent you need your systems to connect and what you need to be able to do with them. 

At minimum, a growing business needs increased visibility over all their projects.  

What kind of system can support your growing business?

In this industry, new technology is often regarded with caution — even fear…

• Fear that changing systems and processes is too hard
• Fear that the job implementation will be too big
• Fear that it’s too expensive
• Fear that it will disrupt the business

(Some are even afraid technology will make their job obsolete!)

But the real thing to be afraid of is getting left behind: drowning in paperwork when you could be taking on new projects and training new staff — or crippling your operations with systems that just can’t manage the workload.

In fact, latest-generation technology like an Enterprise Quality Management Software System is surprisingly:

•   User-friendly
•   Easy to implement
•   Cost-effective

And most importantly, rather than making jobs obsolete, new technology will open up the possibility of more projects — and more jobs. 

Reach new levels of efficiency with integrated project management

Implementing new technology will inevitably affect your business. 

But it doesn’t have to disrupt it.

With Kontrol4, we not only provide a fully integrated, customisable project management system, we also have plenty of experience in change management to make the transition as pain-free as possible.

On top of that, our system itself is also simpler and more user-friendly than you might imagine. So once it’s in place, you won’t be struggling.

And you won’t be alone — we’ve helped dozens of other businesses in your exact situation. With our simple, plug-and-play solution, you can have:

•   Seamless communication
•   Access from anywhere
•   One source of truth
•   Technology that’s easy to use and implement
•   Simple duplication of projects with the touch of a button
•   Unlimited data storage
•   Simple, safe, secure systems.

Give the Kontrol4 team a call today 1300 99 67 67 or email contact@kontrol4.com to talk about how you can have a project management system that can keep up with your growing business.