What is the ROI of a Project Management Tool?

High atop the list of questions we receive about our project management tool is: “What is the ROI of your solution?”

Over the years we’ve found that measuring project management ROI can mean more than just time and money. How teams measure improvement, and the cost of achieving it, can vary largely from team to team.

Some teams will primarily judge themselves on raw data – to see if they have completed more work in the same amount of time as last year. Others need a project management tool to communicate more effectively with each other so nothing falls through the cracks.

Whatever the case may be, we cover 4 main areas that should be accounted for when determining the ROI of a project management solution, Time, Money, Communication, and Organization. We have also provided a link to a simple calculator below to estimate your potential ROI! {jump to calculator}

Time

Project management software is designed to save you time so you can apply yourself to higher-value activities. Our most successful customers have reported that their time-savings is worth at least a half of an employee in productivity.

If you saved as little as 10 minutes per day, what could you do with it?

• Plan for tomorrow will help you start the day with purpose.
• Take a longer lunch can clear your head and relax you for the rest of the day.
• Check in on an employee can build rapport.
• Proofread a document more closely might catch a major error.
• Leave early one day to beat traffic! (or maybe in 2020, get a little extra time for a hobby)

However you spend your extra time, make it worth it.

Money

Money is perhaps the biggest topic when talking about the ROI of Workzone or any other project management tool. Of course it is!

Customers have told us that they have utilized Workzone so well that they didn’t need to hire another employee because they became so efficient. Others have told us they hired MORE employees because they impressed upper management so much that they were given more to do! Which direction you would go depends on your office and what your needs are.

When it comes down to real money concerns, Workzone’s annual cost is a fraction of an employee’s salary. Is the cost of a couple lunches per month per employee worth it to achieve your business goals?

Communication

According to Projecttimes.com, 1 in 5 projects fail because of ineffective communication. A project management tool will make communication across the team much easier and clearer.

What can project managers do to improve communication within a dedicated project management tool or standalone productivity tool? Simple features like commenting on projects, annotating images and screenshots, status symbols alerting users to late work, and emailed reminders to keep the project moving, improve communication for all and make sure everyone knows what is going on.

Another area of communication that is impacted is your inbox. All of the sudden, your inbox isn’t flooded with small, unimportant project updates. With a sophisticated tool like Workzone, you control the relevancy and regularity of the emails.

Organization

Getting work organized in a busy work environment can be priceless. What organization really gives is the ability to standardize processes. Standardizing processes in a tool like Workzone can immediately impact project and team organization.

A prime example of standardization is using project templates. Templates allow for full project plans to be deployed with just a couple of clicks. Resources are assigned, dates are calculated, and the project is off and running.

Another great example is how the project intake process becomes instantly organized and standardized through project request forms. Initial project requests enter a dashboard and can be approved into a project with the click of a button.

Another immediate result that most of our customers notice is how everyone has a direction when a project management tool like Workzone is implemented. Managers can work off of high-level views of projects and dive deep into task when they need to, but non-managers can just focus on their to-do list to see what they have to work on next.