Project management best practices

As an active project manager and a project management trainer, people often ask me what are the key to successful project management. Although there have been many great books written on the topic, a summary of what I always think it is best practice in the heart of good project management.

Define the scope and objectives

For any project to succeed, it is necessary to understand what the project will achieve. Suppose your boss asks you to organize a campaign to get employees to donate blood. This is the goal to get as much blood donated to blood banks? Or is it to raise the company profile in the local community? Deciding what is the real objective is to help you determine how to go about planning and project management.

The project manager should also define the scope of the project. It is the organization of transport for the blood bank staff in the project? Or, should staff make their own way? Decide what activities within the area or outside the scope of the project has a great impact on the amount of work to be undertaken during the project.

Understanding who the stakeholders is also crucial if you’re going to get their support and understand what each person expects to be supplied under the project. Once you have defined the scope and objectives, you need to get interested parties to review and agree with them, and agreed that should be on the list of stakeholders.

Define benefits

To achieve the desired result from the project, you must define things (or products) must be delivered before the end of the project. If your project is an advertising
campaign for a new chocolate bar, and one result could be the artwork for a newspaper advertisement. Therefore, you need to decide what tangible things are to be delivered and document in detail what these things are. At the end of the day, someone will end up doing the work to produce the product, so it must be described clearly and unambiguously.

Once you have defined the products, you need to have key stakeholders review the work and have agreed that this reflects accurately and unambiguously what is expected to be delivered under the project. Once you have agreed, you can begin planning the project. Not the definition of results in sufficient detail and clarity is often a reason why projects go wrong.

Project planning

This is the time to define how you will achieve the desired outcomes of the project resulted in the definition of objectives and results. Planning requires the project manager decides which people, resources and budget needed to complete the project. You will have to decide whether to break the project into manageable phases, decide which products will be delivered in each phase and determine the composition of your project team. Since you have already defined the results, you must decide what activities are needed to produce each product.

You can use techniques such as Work Breakdown Structures (WBS) to help you succeed. You will need to estimate the time and effort required to complete each activity, dependencies between related activities and decide on a realistic timetable for completing the activities. It is always a good idea to involve the project team in estimating the duration of activities will be as those who actually do the work. Capturing all this in the project plan document. You also need to get the key stakeholders to review and agree to this plan.

In developing the project plan, a project manager is often under pressure to produce a plan that meets the (low) expectations of some stakeholders. It is important that the project manager comes with a realistic schedule – one that he / she thinks it is realistic to achieve. It’s going to be doing anyone a favor if they succumb to pressure and agreed to deliver the project in a totally unrealistic schedule.

Communication

Even the best made project plans are useless unless they are communicated effectively to the project team. Everyone on the team must know exactly what is expected of them, what their responsibilities are and what we are responsible for. Once I worked on a project where the project manager sat in his office surrounded by large outflows of color print of his latest plans. The problem was that nobody in his team knew what the tasks and milestones were because he had shared with them the plan. Indeed, the success of the project all kinds of problems with people leaving and doing activities that are important rather than doing the tasks assigned by the project manager.

Monitoring and reporting project progress

Once your project is underway and has a plan, you need to constantly monitor the actual progress of project against project progress. To do this, you need to get progress reports from project team members who are actually doing the work. You have to register any variation between actual and planned cost, schedule and scope. You will be advised of any variations to your manager and key stakeholders and take corrective actions if the variations are too large.

There are many ways you can adjust the plan to get the project back on track (rearrange the order of tasks, assign tasks in parallel, if the change is small, or add more staff for the project or reduce the extent, if the variation is very large).

All projects require the project manager to constantly juggle three things: cost, scope and timetable. If the project manager and one of these increases, then one of the other elements will inevitably have to change too. Thus, for a project is running late to retrieve what we can deliver to its original timetable, the budget could be increased by employing more staff (although this is not always achieved the desired result of reducing the time remaining to complete the project), or the scope must be reduced. It is juggling these three elements – known as the triangle of the project – which typically causes a project manager to tear their hair out in frustration!

Managing change

All projects change in some way. Often, a major stakeholder in the middle of a project is going to change your mind about what the project must meet. In longer term projects, the business environment has changed since the beginning of the project, so assumptions made at the start of the project may no longer be valid. This often results in the scope or outcome of the project that need to be changed. If a project manager simply accepted all these changes in the project, the project would inevitably be delivered late (and perhaps never completed), and that inevitably goes budget.

For change management, project manager can make decisions about whether or not to incorporate the changes immediately or in the future, or to reject them. This increases the chances of success of the project because the project manager to control how changes are incorporated, can allocate resources accordingly and can plan when and how changes are made. Effectively manage the changes are not often cited as a major reason why projects fail.

Risk management

Risks are events that may adversely affect project success. I have worked on projects where some of the risks include: the staff lacks the expertise to do the job properly, the hardware is not delivered on time, the control room is at risk of flooding in a major storm, and many others. The risks vary from project to project, but it is important to identify the main risks of a project as soon as possible and plan the necessary actions to avoid risk, or if the risk can not be avoided, at least to mitigate the risk in order reduce its impact if it does occur. This is known as risk management.

Do you manage all the risks? No, because there can be too much to handle, and not all risks have the same impact. Therefore, it is a simple way to identify as many risks as you can, consider how each risk is likely to occur on a scale of 1 to 3 (3 being the worst), estimate their impact on project a scale of 1 to 3 (3 being the worst), then multiply the numbers. The result is the risk weight. A high risk weighting is the most serious risk. Only the management of the top ten risks ie those with the highest risk weighting. Constantly reviewing the risks and be constantly on the lookout for new risks as they have the habit of jumping in unexpected moments.

Not managing risks effectively is often cited as a major reason why projects fail.

Abstract

So in a nutshell, these best practices are the main things that I hope that all project managers to do. Apply to all projects big or small. Project management is not rocket science. The implementation of best practices in the project can not guarantee that your project comes in under budget, on time and exceeds the expectations of all stakeholders, but its implementation will certainly give you a better chance of delivering your project successfully to if they are not implemented in your project.