Productivity Management vs. Project Management: What’s The Difference?
There is a lot of confusion between productivity management and project management, even in organizations that invest in them. It’s easy to believe that they both mean the same thing when in fact they refer to two sets of ideas and frameworks. If you are looking to improve productivity both at a personal and organizational level, it’s important to understand the difference between productivity and project management.
Why should you know the difference between productivity management and project management?
The discussion about the difference between productivity and project management isn’t merely an academic one. In a world where remote and hybrid work is getting normalized, management, communication, and collaboration have to keep up with the need of the times.
Maximizing productivity and managing projects when employees are physically together is one thing. Doing it when they are remotely placed is a whole different thing. Without direct interactions and opportunities to give quick feedback, it would be challenging to manage both projects and productivity. This leads us to the second reason.
Organizations that don’t differentiate between productivity management and project management run the risk of choosing the wrong platforms. While there are exceptions like Heycollab, most platforms focus on managing either of the two things. When managers get the wrong solution, the problems only get bigger.
As businesses face the challenges thrown up by asynchronous communication, there is a greater need to correctly identify problems in collaboration and come up with situation-specific strategies. It’s in this context that it becomes important for businesses to know the difference between productivity and project management.
What is productivity management?
Productivity management is about raising your output with a specific set of resources. It focuses on selecting and implementing a specific set of skills to improve the productivity of individuals and teams. Productivity management is about putting tools and techniques in place to make sure that you are organized and productive in every aspect of life.
At its core, productivity is about the amount of output you get for every unit of input. The input could be time and other resources, but productivity is usually measured against a specific duration.
At an organizational level, productivity management is an important part of people management. Businesses are always looking for ways to increase overall productivity and use goals, incentives, personal development programs, and internal communication to raise the productivity of their employees.
Why does productivity management matter?
An organization’s productivity is the combined productivity of its people and systems. Managing productivity is important because it allows you to improve the performance of individuals, a process that will raise the efficiency of the whole organization.
One of the biggest advantages of managing productivity is that the process would reveal redundancies and inefficiencies in the organization. In a system that doesn’t invest in productivity management, the problems won’t be visible or diagnosed correctly.
For example, if the sales team is not performing to their potential due to the lack of a viable CRM platform, the problem won’t be analyzed without a concerted effort to increase productivity.
Secondly, productivity management has bigger repercussions beyond individuals. When the performance of employees is tracked and studied, it would impact the bottom line of the business. So, managing productivity is crucial if you want to maximize your gains.
What is project management?
Project management focuses on executing a specific project using a particular team within a given deadline. This requires individuals with the desired skills, resources, and tools to achieve previously defined objectives. At the heart of project management is a set of processes to enable the team to reach the goals as outlined in the scope statement of the project.
Along with the specific outcome, there are several milestones to be managed in a project. Project management also constitutes the monitoring and managing of these micro-goals at specific intervals to achieve the larger objective. This helps the team evaluate its progress and make the necessary iterations.
Why does project management matter?
The aim of project management is the successful completion of a specific project and to ensure that it achieves its pre-determined targets. Under project management, teams and their leaders will have to allocate resources, budget for the entirety of the project, identify and effectively manage risks, and communicate everything to team members and other stakeholders in the system.
Project management ensures that the team can hit its targets with a given set of resources. Without a methodical system to track and manage, the team may miss the deadline, overshoot the budget, or deliver subpar results.
Underperformance can affect the organization’s product development, sales, marketing, and innovation. In companies without a proven and reliable project management process, sooner or later the bottom line will be impacted.
Productivity vs. Project Management: Key differences
Project management involves teams where productivity management is focused on the individual. The former deals with the big picture while the latter starts at the granular level. Project management is more about collaboration, communication, and seamless interactions for collective benefit. Productivity management refers to an overall sense of productivity in both the work and personal lives of an individual.
But both productivity and project management can influence broader outcomes in an organization. Being productive in work and life is the key to anyone’s success. Being able to track your time, organize your tasks, and create milestones along the way will allow you to streamline your work and be more productive. By enhancing the productivity of individuals, you would also be making them successful in their projects as team members.
Project management ensures that teams accomplish targets with a given set of resources. Every completed project would make the team and the organization more agile and innovative and positively influence the bottom line.
With a productivity and project management software like Heycollab, you will be making significant improvements to both productivity and project management. You get better collaboration and communication through an exceptionally easy-to-use interface. Designed for founders, startups, and freelancers, Heycollab is the platform that can finally deliver the combined benefits of productivity and project management.