© 2011-2019 Orangescrum Research Lab, San Jose, California 1
How a Project Management Tool can Reduce your
Operational Cost
Businesses are often faced with stiff challenges in maintaining low project, operational costs
and increase their profits. And rightly so!
Sadly, that is not the case always.
Running a profitable enterprise requires a lot of control around procurement, resource
utilization, real estate costs, talent, technology costs, project management, travel expenses,
marketing and R&D budgets etc.
Larger the organization, greater the complexity w.r.t a diverse, dispersed and global
workforce, cultural implications, local government regulations as well as an equally complex
organization hierarchy spanning multiple departments.
Each department has their own budget, strategic goals and timelines to meet these goals.
At any given time there are multiple initiatives, projects that are being undertaken by the
various functions across the organization involving multiple teams both local and global.
Thus having a handle on all of these projects across the organization is not an easy task by
any means.

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It is just overwhelming!
Imagine the workforce, efforts and cost you would need to constantly monitor and stay on
top of all initiative run in your company.
No wonder, companies globally make conscious investments for multiple work
management, collaboration and productivity management tools for their teams.
Brings your Organization Together
A project portfolio management tool is capable of handling all your strategic initiatives
centrally.
Your entire team is aboard a single platform for all its activities.
The significant benefit of an enterprise project portfolio management tool is in its ability to
track all initiatives under one roof.
The decision makers can access progress of the key projects in real time and track
performance of their business.
At the same time, the project managers, can easily highlight risks and issues that need
immediate management attention and action.
The management team can quickly identify any non-performing projects and act decisively
in a timely manner.
Thus saving efforts and costs on initiatives that have outlived their purpose or would not
prove profitable as expected earlier.
All these man-hours saved can be repurposed for other profitable pursuits.
Task Tracking
Businesses are often faced with stiff challenges in maintaining low project & operational
costs while increasing their profits. And rightly so!
I love project management tools for a very basic reason – no matter the size and
composition of your team. Right from the CEO to the freshman –It works!

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You can breakdown large initiatives into multiple projects allocate resources to these
individual projects and build a thorough work breakdown structure for seamless execution.
Each and every team member has their roles cut-out.
Everyone knows what is expected of them, how their work impacts the work of their team
members and how crucial their deliverable is to the overall project goal A.k.a better
stakeholder expectation management.
In other words, high accountability and ownership within the teams.
Healthy competition to motivate and help each other win.
Collaboration is easy, administrative delays are prevented and the job is done much faster.
You deliver on time, with quality. Your customers are happy and you get paid faster.
And as they say, when you have more output and less chaos, your profits rise. I.e. top
dollars for your investment in a project management tool.
Improved Time and Resource Management
Time is money may be a cliché.
But successful enterprises keep it at the core of their business vision and mission.
Timing is crucial in your go-to market strategy, in staying ahead of your competition and
delivering your products and services to your customers when they need them.
Also, your resources and their efforts are two of the largest cost buckets.
When organizations think of minimizing cost – this is where they train their guns first!
But what would you minimize and optimize if you do not know where to start?
Resource allocation, availability, utilization and a thorough picture of your billable hours
spent are a must to keep your projects and company profitable.
How do you measure them without proper time tracking and resource utilization reports?

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Time tracking tools offer comprehensive measures to
 record hours spent by your resources on various activities
 categorize your spent hours neatly into billable and non-billable
 advanced task breakdown and classification to see what task types consume
maximum amount of your team’s time
 resource availability to maintain optimal workloads and prevent resource overload
 hourly rates report help see which resources are most effectively utilized and which
aren’t
Comprehensive time and resource analytics help you plan your resource requirements
across the company.
You have clarity around the number of new hires you would need to support existing as well
as upcoming projects.
This also helps to keep your organization agile and nimble with minimal to zero bench
strength.
With the right resource forecast and optimal resource utilization you maximize billability on
every hour spent by your resources.
Thus, you have a lean operation team with more on time results, better cost savings and
high revenue.
Cost Savings from Multiple Tools & Licenses
Large teams continue to work in silos and deploy tools of their own choice based on their
individual needs.
Not a good thing in the long run at all.
Simply put, your teams are building chaos rather than preventing. There is a very high
chance that:
 multiple teams using multiple tools for the same purpose
 company’s data is on disparate sources
 no single source of truth
 humungous efforts in synching the info from multiple platforms
 duplicity of efforts and initiatives

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 security is compromised as some tools may be on public cloud or SaaS offerings
 disconnected teams
 management doesn’t get a holistic overview of all initiatives
 technical debt and overhead in managing multiple apps
 tremendous IT expenditure
 lot of vendor management
Using multiple tools creates a lot of blind spots and you run a very high risk of lettings things
fall through the cracks.
Imagine where you cannot present the true status of your projects to your management and
neither can they take the right decisions at the right time.
The cost of which is just unimaginable!
The Crux
Project collaboration and task management tools help you get rid of the above problems in
a single stroke.
Implementing robust enterprise project portfolio and task management software augurs
well for organizations to have that competitive edge.
Coordinated efforts result in long term gains, increase ownership, make teams productive
and help minimize overall operational costs.
Top of all, you are in absolute control of your business as you have the granular visibility of
all aspects of your projects.
You have the best of People, Process & Technology at your service to help achieve your
goals. Faster!
Smart teams around the globe have trusted Orangescrum Open Source Enterprise edition
for their project management needs.
Be it product development, marketing campaigns, research projects, customer support or
agile project management; Orangescrum enables it all!
Haven’t tried yet? Take a tour!