You need to use project management techniques to help you succeed, whether you're planning your wedding, making a new website, or building your dream house by the sea. This article is a summary of 7 key best practises for project management that will help you finish your project successfully.
Managing a project can be daunting. You need to use project management techniques to help you succeed, whether you're planning your wedding, making a new website, or building your dream house by the sea. I'll give you a summary of the top seven best practises that are at the heart of good project management and can help you finish your project successfully.
Set the boundaries and goals.
First, you should know what the goals of the project are. If your boss asks you to organise a blood donor campaign, is the goal to get as much blood as possible? Or is it to get more people to know about the local company? You can plan the project better if you know what the real goals are.
Scope is what sets the limits of the project. Is it in scope to set up transportation for staff to get to the blood bank? Or, should the staff get there on their own? The amount of work that needs to be done will depend on what's in scope and what's not.
Find out who the stakeholders are and what they want, and ask them for their help. Once you've set the scope and goals, get the people who matter to look over them and agree to them.
Set out what needs to be done.
You have to say what the project will give you. If your project is to promote a new chocolate bar, one of the things you might deliver is the artwork for an ad. So, decide what real things will be delivered and write them down in enough detail for someone else to be able to make them correctly and well.
Key stakeholders must look over the deliverables definition and agree that it accurately describes what must be delivered.
Planning a project
Planning means that the project manager has to figure out how many people, what materials, and how much money are needed to finish the project.
Using tools like Work Breakdown Structures, you need to figure out what activities are needed to make the deliverables. You need to figure out how much time and work each activity will take, how it will affect other activities, and what a realistic schedule for finishing them is. Get the project team to help you figure out how long things will take. Set up milestones that show when important dates are in the project. Put this in the plan for the project. Get the important people to look over the plan and agree to it.
Communication
Plans for projects are useless if they aren't shared with the project team well. Everyone on the team needs to know what their jobs are. I once worked on a project where the project manager sat in his office surrounded by big paper schedules. The problem was that he hadn't shared the plan with his team, so no one knew what the tasks and milestones were. People did things that they thought were more important than what the project manager had asked them to do. This caused a lot of problems.
Keeping track of project progress and giving updates
Once your project is up and running, you need to keep an eye on it and compare how things are going to how you planned. You will need updates from the people on the project team. You should write down any differences between the actual cost, schedule, and scope and what was planned. You should tell your manager and other important people about any changes and take action if the changes are too big.
You can change the plan in many ways to get the project back on track, but cost, scope, and schedule will always have to be juggled. If the project manager changes one of these, he or she will have to change one or both of the other two. The project triangle, which is made up of these three parts, is what usually gives a project manager the most trouble.
Change management
People with a stake in the project often change their minds about what needs to be done. Sometimes the business environment changes after a project starts, so assumptions made at the start of the project may no longer be true. This often means that the project's goals or deliverables need to be changed. If a project manager let every change happen, the project would go over budget, take longer than planned, and might never be finished.
By keeping track of changes, the project manager can decide whether or not to use the changes right away, in the future, or not at all. This makes it more likely that the project will be successful because the project manager is in charge of how the changes are made, can make sure the right resources are used, and can plan when and how the changes will be made. Often, projects fail because people don't know how to handle changes well.
Risk management
Risks are things that can go wrong with a project and make it less likely to be successful. I've worked on projects where some of the risks were that the staff didn't have the technical skills to do the work, that the hardware didn't arrive on time, that the control room could flood, and many other things. Every project has different risks, but the biggest ones must be found as soon as possible. Plans must be made to avoid the risk or, if that's not possible, to lessen the impact of the risk if it does happen. This is called managing risks.
You don't manage all risks because there could be too many of them and not all risks have the same effect. So, list all the risks and figure out how likely each one is to happen (1 = unlikely, 2 = maybe likely, 3 = very likely). Estimate how much it will affect the project (1=low, 2=medium, 3=high), then multiply the two numbers to get the risk factor. High risk factors mean that the risks are the worst. Take care of the ten with the most risk. Always look for new risks and review the ones you already know about. They can happen at any time.
A common reason why projects fail is that people don't handle risks well enough.
Summary
Following these best practises won't make sure a project will be successful, but it will give it a better chance. If you don't follow these best practises, your project will almost certainly fail.
