A working guide to project success
A working guide to project success:
Here are some tips to help you on your project management journey. This is definitely not a comprehensive list but rather a good helicopter view to help you identify areas of strengths and weaknesses.
- At the start of your projects, make sure everything and everyone in the project knows how they are going to work together – How will A connect up with B to achieve C? Do your project team members know what their roles and responsibilities are on the project?
- Define and control what the project will do – Defining your baseline project scope is vital to being able to effectively manage it and identify scope creep.
- Make a schedule and keep track of how the project is doing – I wrote an earlier blog post about the importance of planning and taking the time to create your baseline schedule😋
- Stay within the budget and spend money wisely – Get on top of your financials from the beginning.
- Make sure the project meets the quality standards – Whether quality is baked into your processes or its sequenced should still be documented.
- Use the resources you have in the best way – you may have the best team in the world, but if you keep reprioritising their workload, they will quickly get frustrated and output will suffer.
- Keep everyone informed about what’s going on – communication is key! I wrote a previous post about ways to improve your communication on projects and its one of the areas that I cannot emphasize enough.
- Plan for things that might go wrong and fix them – running proper risk identification sessions and continually reviewing and documenting new risks as they arise is so important.
- Get what you need from outside sources – vendors are in business for a reason, they want to deliver successful projects for their clients just like you. Make sure that deliverables are clearly captured so that all parties are aligned on delivery.
- Listen to what the people who care about the project have to say and keep them happy – Combined with communication, planning effective stakeholder engagement and providing them with the right level of project visibility can directly impact your project success.
Happy project managing! 🙂