Project management can be daunting. To successfully steer a project from idea to reality requires you to have a lot of different skills. It requires you to have an ability to plan out the efforts of a whole team of people and make sure those efforts all come together in the right way at the right time. It requires you to have an ability to mediate interpersonal conflicts, deal with big egos, and communicate with poor communicators. If you want to excel in your career as a project manager, you should follow these best practices for project management.
Defining the Project Objectives
You can’t do anything else until you have clearly defined the project objectives. There is the main objective of the project, of course, but there are also usually many other objectives or tasks you need to accomplish as a part of achieving the main objective. For example, you may be in charge of putting together the manager’s annual meeting. While the meeting actually taking place IS the main objective and end result, there are other objectives that are a part of it, such as renting the meeting space, arranging transportation, and hiring caterers.
There are also often unstated objectives. For example, if you’re overseeing the development of a new product, you might also be expected to design it in a way that raises your company’s profile with a new demographic. Once you have clearly defined all of the project objectives, you will be ready to start making plans.
Making Plans
Once you have all the objectives defined, you can make detailed plans for how each objective will be met.
The first thing to do is to consider the strengths and weaknesses of each member of your team. Match the team member with the task that best suits his or her skill set. People who may work best alone should be put on tasks that require the focus of a single person. People who have the most desirable skills in relation to the project’s needs, as well as an ability to multitask, can be assigned to help with the efforts of multiple groups. Matching the person to the task will go a long way to ensuring the success of your project.
Next, you’ll need to work out a project timeline. The most effective way to do this is to work backwards.
- Write down all of the elements of the project that will need to be completed by the completion date.
- Then, under each element, write down the things that need to be done to make it happen.
- Under each of those, write the things that need to be done to make it happen, and so on in that fashion.
In this way you can easily work out the order in which everything needs to happen. When working out how much time to assign to each task, consider adding more time than you think will be needed to protect the schedule against the unexpected.
Communicating Effectively
As the project manager, you need to set standards that encourage clear communication. Having an open-door policy is a good start, but you’ll need to do more. Encourage your team to be proactive and creative. For example, let your team know that they should make known any potential problems that arise.
You can also encourage the team to speak up if they have a different solution that might work best. Consider brainstorming sessions with the team to allow for this type of creative thinking and sharing of ideas. If your team members are afraid to go to you with problems, they will keep critical information from you until it’s too late. If they fear being ridiculed for making new suggestions, then your team will be unable to innovate. Instead, you should encourage everyone on the project to speak their minds and explore ideas. If you use failures as opportunities to learn, your team will become more skilled and more competent.
You’ll also need to encourage your team members to communicate with each other. Encourage shy or introverted team members to speak up and contribute to meetings. Don’t allow for the big egos on your team to dominate conversations. You may also require periodic peer to peer progress reports when important information needs to be passed around.
Tracking Progress
You also need to implement an effective means of tracking the project progress of each of your team members’ efforts. Set up a progress report schedule for each team member. The reports should be frequent enough to allow you to catch any problems early enough to fix them before they cause serious problems. Make note of variations between planned and actual costs, schedule, and features.
Managing Changes
Project stakeholders sometimes change their minds about what they want a project to accomplish after the project is already underway. If you accept every change they want made to the project, it could easily go over budget or miss the deadline. To manage changes made after a project has begun, you’ll need to choose between one of the following:
- should you incorporate the changes to the project immediately
- can the changes be made sometime in the future
- should you fight to reject the changes entirely
While you obviously must try to respect the shareholders’ wishes, you are ultimately the one responsible for the project’s success, so you must give careful thought to how these changes should be incorporated. Not managing such changes is a common reason why projects of all types fail.
Managing Risk
Unexpected problems are another common reason why projects fail. As a project manager, you need to anticipate the risks from unexpected events and plan for them. Spend some time at the start of the project trying to think of everything that could conceivably happen that would put the project at risk. You should also periodically hold meetings with key team members so you can get out in front of any problems you haven’t already anticipated. The potential risks you may run into will change as the project develops. Make plans for any risks that are likely to occur, and also for unlikely risks that could have very adverse effects if they did occur.
The Takeaway
Project management requires you to have a lot of different skills in project management and other areas. By following these best practices for project management, you will give your project and your team a better chance of success, no matter the type of project it is.
