As both an energetic project manager and a project management teacher, people often ask me what are the essential aspects to successful project management. Though there have been many great books written about them, I often summarize what I consider to be the guidelines at the heart of good project management.
Determine the scope and objectives
For just about any project to become successful you will need to know very well what the project is supposed to accomplish. Suppose your boss asks you to prepare a campaign to get the workers to donate blood. Is the goal of this to get just as much blood given to the local blood bank? Or, is it to improve the profile of the business in the neighborhood community? Determining what the real aim is may help you to determine how you go about planning and controlling the project.
The project manager must also define the scope of the project. Is the operation of transport to just take staff to the blood bank within the range of the task? Or, must team make their own way there? Deciding which activities are within the scope or out of scope of the project includes a large effect on the quantity of work which must be performed through the project.
A knowledge of who are the stakeholders is also crucial if you're likely to enlist their help and understand what every person wants to-be sent from the task. After you have defined the scope and objectives, you'll want to get the stakeholders to review them and accept them along with agreeing who should be on-the set of stakeholders.
Establish the deliverables
To attain the desired outcome from the project, you must establish what things (or items) are to be provided by the end of the project. If your project is an marketing
Plan for a new chocolate bar, the other of the deliverables could be the graphics for a newspaper advertising. So, you need to determine what concrete things are to be delivered and report in enough detail what these things are. At the end of-the day, someone will end up doing the work to make the deliverable, so it must be clearly and unambiguously defined.
When you have identified the deliverables, you'll need to have the key stakeholders review the work and encourage them to agree that this unambiguously and correctly reflects what they expect to be delivered from the project. This prodound read more essay has several wonderful aids for how to see it. When they have agreed, you can begin to plan the project. Not defining the deliverables in enough detail or quality can be a reasons why projects go wrong.
Project planning
This is the time when you determine how you will obtain the specified result of the project embodied with-in the goals and definition of deliverables. Planning requires the project manager decides which people, resources and budget have to complete the project. You'll have to decide if you'll split up your project into manageable stages, decide which products will be sent in each period, and decide the composition of one's project team. You should determine what actions are required to create each deliverable, since you have already identified the deliverables.
You may use techniques such as Work Breakdown Structures (WBS) to aid you to achieve this. You'll need to calculate the time and energy needed to complete each exercise, dependencies between related activities and determine a realistic schedule to complete the activities. It's often recommended to require the project team in calculating how long the activities will just take since they will be the people actually doing the work. Capture all of this to the project plan document. You also need to get the key stakeholders to review and accept this course of action.
When building the project plan, a project manager is frequently under great pressure to produce a plan which meets the (unrealistic) expectations of some of the stakeholders. It's essential here that the project manager pops up with a realistic schedule - one which he/she thinks is realistic to achieve. You'll be doing no one a favor if you yield to pressure and agree to provide the project in an entirely unrealistic schedule.
Communication
Even the very best made project plans are useless unless they've been communicated efficiently to the project team. Everyone on the team must know just what is expected of them, what their responsibilities are, and what they're in charge of. I once done a project where the project supervisor sat in his office surrounded by big coloring print outs of his latest ideas. The situation was, nobody on his team knew what-the goals and tasks were because he had not provided the master plan together. Needless to say the project hit all kinds of difficulties with people going off and doing the activities that they considered important instead of doing the activities given by the project manager.
Tracking and reporting project progress
Once your project is underway and you've an agreed plan, you will need to constantly monitor the actual progress of the project against the planned progress. To get this done, you will need to get reports of progress from the project team members that are actually doing the work. You'll need to record any variations involving the planned and actual cost, schedule and scope. You'll have to just take corrective actions when the variations get too large and report any variations for your manager and key stake-holders.
There are plenty of ways you can adjust the program in order to acquire the project back on course (rearrange the order of tasks, assign tasks in parallel if the variation is small, or add more staff to the project or reduce the scope if the variation is extremely large).
All projects require the manager to constantly manage three things: price, scope and schedule. In the event the project manager increases one of these, then one of the other factors will undoubtedly need to be changed too. So, for a project which is running behind schedule to recover so it can be sent to it's unique planned schedule, the budget might be improved by utilizing more staff (although this often never achieves the desired result of decreasing the time left to complete the project), or the scope will have to be paid off. It's the juggling of the three components - referred to as the project triangle - that typically triggers a project manager to tear their hair out in frustration!
Change administration
All projects change in some manner. Often, a vital stakeholder in the middle of the project may change their mind about what the project has to deliver. On tasks of longer period, the business environment has frequently changed because the start of the project, so assumptions made in the beginning of-the project might no longer be valid. This frequently results in the range or deliverables of the task needing to be changed. If your project manager simply accepted most of these changes to the project, the project would inevitably be shipped late (and perhaps would never ever be done) and would inevitably review budget.
By controlling changes, the manager will make decisions about whether or not to include the changes immediately or as time goes on, or to reject them. This increases the chances of project success since the project manager controls how the changes are incorporated, can allocate resources appropriately and can approach when and how the changes are made. Maybe not managing changes successfully is usually mentioned as being a important reason why projects fail. Identify more about istanbul director by visiting our forceful article directory.
Risk administration
Challenges are any activities which may adversely affect the successful outcome of the project. I've worked on projects where several of the challenges have included: staff lacking the technical skills to execute the task correctly, hardware perhaps not being delivered on time, the control room staying at risk of flooding in a major thunderstorm and many others. Risks will change from project to project but it's important to identify the primary challenges to a project when possible and to plan the actions necessary to prevent the risk, or, if the risk can't be avoided, to at least reduce the risk so as to minimize its influence if it does occur. It's this that is called risk management.
Would you manage all dangers? No, because there may be too many to manage, and not all risks have exactly the same effect. Therefore an easy way is to identify as many dangers as you can, work-out how likely each possibility is to occur on a scale of 1 to 3 (3 being the worst), estimate its impact on the task on a scale of 1 to 3 (3 being the worst), then multiply the two numbers together. The end result could be the risk weighting. A higher risk weighting is probably the most severe risk. Just manage the top five risks i.e. those with the best risk weighting. Simply because they have a habit of jumping up at unforeseen moments constantly review the risks and constantly be looking for new risks.
Not managing dangers efficiently is also often cited as being a important reasons why projects fail.
Summary
So, in a nutshell, these guidelines will be the main things that I'd expect all project managers to perform. They're appropriate on all projects big or small. Project management is not rocket science. Applying best-practices on your project can't guarantee that your project comes in under budget, on time and exceeds all of the objectives of the stakeholders, but using them will certainly give you a far greater possibility of delivering your project properly than if you do not apply them on your project.
Determine the scope and objectives
For just about any project to become successful you will need to know very well what the project is supposed to accomplish. Suppose your boss asks you to prepare a campaign to get the workers to donate blood. Is the goal of this to get just as much blood given to the local blood bank? Or, is it to improve the profile of the business in the neighborhood community? Determining what the real aim is may help you to determine how you go about planning and controlling the project.
The project manager must also define the scope of the project. Is the operation of transport to just take staff to the blood bank within the range of the task? Or, must team make their own way there? Deciding which activities are within the scope or out of scope of the project includes a large effect on the quantity of work which must be performed through the project.
A knowledge of who are the stakeholders is also crucial if you're likely to enlist their help and understand what every person wants to-be sent from the task. After you have defined the scope and objectives, you'll want to get the stakeholders to review them and accept them along with agreeing who should be on-the set of stakeholders.
Establish the deliverables
To attain the desired outcome from the project, you must establish what things (or items) are to be provided by the end of the project. If your project is an marketing
Plan for a new chocolate bar, the other of the deliverables could be the graphics for a newspaper advertising. So, you need to determine what concrete things are to be delivered and report in enough detail what these things are. At the end of-the day, someone will end up doing the work to make the deliverable, so it must be clearly and unambiguously defined.
When you have identified the deliverables, you'll need to have the key stakeholders review the work and encourage them to agree that this unambiguously and correctly reflects what they expect to be delivered from the project. This prodound read more essay has several wonderful aids for how to see it. When they have agreed, you can begin to plan the project. Not defining the deliverables in enough detail or quality can be a reasons why projects go wrong.
Project planning
This is the time when you determine how you will obtain the specified result of the project embodied with-in the goals and definition of deliverables. Planning requires the project manager decides which people, resources and budget have to complete the project. You'll have to decide if you'll split up your project into manageable stages, decide which products will be sent in each period, and decide the composition of one's project team. You should determine what actions are required to create each deliverable, since you have already identified the deliverables.
You may use techniques such as Work Breakdown Structures (WBS) to aid you to achieve this. You'll need to calculate the time and energy needed to complete each exercise, dependencies between related activities and determine a realistic schedule to complete the activities. It's often recommended to require the project team in calculating how long the activities will just take since they will be the people actually doing the work. Capture all of this to the project plan document. You also need to get the key stakeholders to review and accept this course of action.
When building the project plan, a project manager is frequently under great pressure to produce a plan which meets the (unrealistic) expectations of some of the stakeholders. It's essential here that the project manager pops up with a realistic schedule - one which he/she thinks is realistic to achieve. You'll be doing no one a favor if you yield to pressure and agree to provide the project in an entirely unrealistic schedule.
Communication
Even the very best made project plans are useless unless they've been communicated efficiently to the project team. Everyone on the team must know just what is expected of them, what their responsibilities are, and what they're in charge of. I once done a project where the project supervisor sat in his office surrounded by big coloring print outs of his latest ideas. The situation was, nobody on his team knew what-the goals and tasks were because he had not provided the master plan together. Needless to say the project hit all kinds of difficulties with people going off and doing the activities that they considered important instead of doing the activities given by the project manager.
Tracking and reporting project progress
Once your project is underway and you've an agreed plan, you will need to constantly monitor the actual progress of the project against the planned progress. To get this done, you will need to get reports of progress from the project team members that are actually doing the work. You'll need to record any variations involving the planned and actual cost, schedule and scope. You'll have to just take corrective actions when the variations get too large and report any variations for your manager and key stake-holders.
There are plenty of ways you can adjust the program in order to acquire the project back on course (rearrange the order of tasks, assign tasks in parallel if the variation is small, or add more staff to the project or reduce the scope if the variation is extremely large).
All projects require the manager to constantly manage three things: price, scope and schedule. In the event the project manager increases one of these, then one of the other factors will undoubtedly need to be changed too. So, for a project which is running behind schedule to recover so it can be sent to it's unique planned schedule, the budget might be improved by utilizing more staff (although this often never achieves the desired result of decreasing the time left to complete the project), or the scope will have to be paid off. It's the juggling of the three components - referred to as the project triangle - that typically triggers a project manager to tear their hair out in frustration!
Change administration
All projects change in some manner. Often, a vital stakeholder in the middle of the project may change their mind about what the project has to deliver. On tasks of longer period, the business environment has frequently changed because the start of the project, so assumptions made in the beginning of-the project might no longer be valid. This frequently results in the range or deliverables of the task needing to be changed. If your project manager simply accepted most of these changes to the project, the project would inevitably be shipped late (and perhaps would never ever be done) and would inevitably review budget.
By controlling changes, the manager will make decisions about whether or not to include the changes immediately or as time goes on, or to reject them. This increases the chances of project success since the project manager controls how the changes are incorporated, can allocate resources appropriately and can approach when and how the changes are made. Maybe not managing changes successfully is usually mentioned as being a important reason why projects fail. Identify more about istanbul director by visiting our forceful article directory.
Risk administration
Challenges are any activities which may adversely affect the successful outcome of the project. I've worked on projects where several of the challenges have included: staff lacking the technical skills to execute the task correctly, hardware perhaps not being delivered on time, the control room staying at risk of flooding in a major thunderstorm and many others. Risks will change from project to project but it's important to identify the primary challenges to a project when possible and to plan the actions necessary to prevent the risk, or, if the risk can't be avoided, to at least reduce the risk so as to minimize its influence if it does occur. It's this that is called risk management.
Would you manage all dangers? No, because there may be too many to manage, and not all risks have exactly the same effect. Therefore an easy way is to identify as many dangers as you can, work-out how likely each possibility is to occur on a scale of 1 to 3 (3 being the worst), estimate its impact on the task on a scale of 1 to 3 (3 being the worst), then multiply the two numbers together. The end result could be the risk weighting. A higher risk weighting is probably the most severe risk. Just manage the top five risks i.e. those with the best risk weighting. Simply because they have a habit of jumping up at unforeseen moments constantly review the risks and constantly be looking for new risks.
Not managing dangers efficiently is also often cited as being a important reasons why projects fail.
Summary
So, in a nutshell, these guidelines will be the main things that I'd expect all project managers to perform. They're appropriate on all projects big or small. Project management is not rocket science. Applying best-practices on your project can't guarantee that your project comes in under budget, on time and exceeds all of the objectives of the stakeholders, but using them will certainly give you a far greater possibility of delivering your project properly than if you do not apply them on your project.