Project Management and ROI: What’s in it For You?

As a project manager, I am always concerned about the return on investment (ROI) when managing a project. The basic idea behind ROI is the financial rewards or payoff for a specific product or project that you may have undertaken. When evaluating a product or project, I take into account the future benefits of a successful product or project during the early stages.

According to Jack and Patti Phillips (who shared via Inc.com/Office & Operations section: Think ROI at the Beginning of a Project), “Walking into a project with ROI in mind will ensure the project delivers.” Keeping ROI in focus can help a project manager analyze the weak and strong points of a project that would affect the delivers a high ROI. Below is an example of how a project manager could view the ROI on a project.

• Project: Determine ROI for Business Online Networking
• Purpose: analyze the affect online networking would have on a business
• Basic steps to determine ROI:
  1. Select a test group of social networking website that could be beneficial to a business
  2. Determine the necessary ways of how one can network on the websites (time, effort, content, etc.)
  3. Create a tracking chart to analyze initial success
  4. Take the initial results and determine the long-term impact of continuing #2 in order to find out if the ROI is worth investing time to network online
  5. Make note of the things that you learned during the analysis stage
  6. Determine where you achieved ROI success and continue to improve

What are some of the ways that you determine ROI for your projects and what tools do you use? Please share about your experiences with ROI and project management.

Image courtesy of:  http://Softpedia.com