When it comes to project management, there are a lot of techniques that can help you improve your process. One of these is benchmarking.
Benchmarking is simply a method of collecting data conducted to find out the most efficient and effective ways from the industry surrounding your organization and project, or processes performed, services obtained or products produced. The information collected from these sources is adapted to your project in order to improve the processes you perform. Benchmarking is like an acceleration pill to your project.
But what is the best way to conduct a benchmarking study? And how can you make sure that the data you’re analyzing is accurate and relevant to your project?
Benefits of Benchmarking in Project Management
There are many ways to improve your project, but few are as effective as benchmarking. Benchmarking is the series of actions or steps of gathering data from the best organizations and adapting it to your own project in order to improve your own processes.
This means that you identify the best from the industry surrounding your organization and project, or processes performed, services obtained or products produced. The information collected from these sources is adapted to your project in order to improve the processes you perform.
By using benchmarking effectively, you can identify areas where your process could be improved, and make the changes needed to bring your organization up to the level of the best in the business.
It is recommended to be used in;
- Delivery performance domain: In the delivery performance domain it is basically used for requirements elicitation.
- Measurement Performance Domain: Benchmarking is a very useful method to compare the performance of the project with the best ones in the sector. Especially while measuring the quality-related performance, it can be a useful method of measurement performance domain.
However, in order to use benchmarking effectively, you must first understand exactly what it is and how it works.
Benchmarking is the series of actions or steps to identify areas for improvement by examining companies side by side to see how your organization's performance is similar or different with that of others . However, in order to make accurate comparisons, you must first understand the conditions of your organization and the performance level of your project very well. Without this self-awareness, it's impossible to make accurate judgments about how you stack up against the competition.
In order to properly execute a benchmarking study in project management, you first need to identify what aspects of your project you would like to improve. This could be anything from the overall process, to the quality of a particular stage of the project. Once you have targeted what you would like to improve, you can then use benchmarking to compare your project's processes or quality against similar organizations or projects. Doing this will give you data that you can use to improve your project's processes and quality.
Benchmarking is generally used in the following parts of project management, but not limited to them;
Types of Benchmarking in Project Management
There are several different types of benchmarking you can undertake. In this part, we'll explore generally accepted four different types of benchmarking and how you can use them to improve your project management.
Internal Benchmarking: Internal project management benchmarking is essential for establishing standards by which to compare and evaluate different types of projects within your company. This process can help to make recommendations for future projects and improve project management performance.
External Benchmarking: The most common approach is external benchmarking, where you compare your business against other companies.
There are a number of benefits to external benchmarking. Firstly, it can help you to understand your competitive position and identify areas where you need to improve. secondly, it can help you to identify best practices and learn from the successes and failures of others. And finally, it can help you to set realistic goals for your business and track your progress over time.
Performance Benchmarking: It is a great way to track your progress and ensure that you're on course to achieving your goals. By collecting information on how well you're doing in terms of outcomes (which could mean anything from revenue growth to customer satisfaction) and comparing these outcomes internally or externally, you can identify areas where you need to make changes or improvements.
Focus Studies: The main goal here is to determine the ideal project management approach and guide decision-making based on past project performances. Effectiveness of business strategies and project management may be tracked this way.
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Comments:
1- benchmark 22.01.2022
Thanks for the article. What kind of questions we may see in pm exams about benchmarking? Are there any question examples about it?
2- Robert 04.08.2023
I wanted to drop a quick note to express my gratitude for your insightful blog post on benchmarking in project management. Your tips on using benchmarking to improve project performance were incredibly helpful.
Recently, I applied benchmarking to a software development project, and the results were remarkable. We identified gaps, made strategic adjustments, and saw a significant improvement in project delivery and team productivity.
However, I have one question: How do you recommend sourcing reliable benchmarking data, especially for niche projects?
Thank you again for sharing your expertise.