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Manage projects in SMEs with OpenProject

Best-Laid Plans

Article from ADMIN 75/2023

By Martin Loschwitz

OpenProject supplies sensible, comprehensive project management for SMEs with few financial inputs.

Many project management tools are complex and require large teams. Still, it is unwise for IT departments in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to do entirely without planning because the benefits massively outweigh the overhead. I look at project management from the theoretical and practical side and, after a brief introduction to the different types of projects, investigate how OpenProject can help IT managers.

Project Management

An entire industry focusing on project management has established itself in the enterprise sector. Scrum, Kanban, and many other approaches are promoted and sold along with tools and training. Major corporations have project management departments that dispatch their agile coaches to corporate departments on a needs-driven basis.

However, project management is largely dead in the water in smaller organizations. SMEs are usually not interesting enough for the large providers of agile training and certification because not enough revenue can be generated. Therefore, in many SMEs, project management is largely unexplored territory or, at best, restricted to the framework of what the typically small number of admins can handle. The idea that project management is not needed is a dangerous fallacy because many of the tasks involved in maintaining and operating servers in large corporations also occur on a smaller scale in SMEs.

These tasks must be completed just as diligently as in larger enterprises to avoid problems arising. SMEs, however, have significantly fewer human resources available to perform these tasks. As a rule, small businesses will need even better project management than large corporations; yet the SME is the place where project management is often in a deplorable state. This state of affairs does not have to be the default. Tools and instruments on the market make it possible to plan and keep track of projects, especially in the open

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