Benchmarking in Project Management

Nowadays, project management tools and methodologies have been highly useful for organisations that seek to implement changes in order to increase their performance. Adding to that, organisations are constantly striving to find new opportunities to make it as much effective for them as possible. One of these opportunities is to examine the outcomes and the lessons learnt from various similar projects that have been completed in the market from similar organisations and thus use benchmarking.

As a business term, benchmarking is the series of actions in order to compare one's business distinct processes, practices or procedures, to other businesses that perform similar activities and have a leading role in the world market. Benchmarking is mainly used so that the company gains valuable information in pursuance of improving its performance and, as a natural outcome, to increase its competitiveness. Usually, there are different indicators that companies use to assess their performance during the process of benchmarking that mainly focus on the aspects of time, cost and quality.

It has been proved that benchmarking against companies that have a leading role in the industry has effectively helped average organizations to improve their performance [2]. Based on that, this article will present how improvements in the performance of companies can be achieved by benchmarking projects. This article will firstly explore the general purpose of benchmarking. Then, it will be examined how the distinct types of benchmarking can be applied to the management of projects. Furthemore, there will be a discussion on what to benchmark and what aptitudes are needed to do so. Finally, an analysis about the limitations of benchmarking in project management will be held.