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Project Management Success with the Top 7 Best Practices
by: Simon Buehring
Managing a project can be daunting. Whether planning
your wedding, developing a new website or building your dream house by the
sea, you need to employ project management techniques to help you succeed.
I'll summarise the top 7 best practices at the heart of good project
management which can help you to achieve project success.
Define the scope and objectives
Firstly, understand the project objectives. Suppose
your boss asks you to organise a blood donor campaign, is the objective to
get as much blood donated as possible? Or, is it to raise the local company
profile? Deciding the real objectives will help you plan the project.
Scope defines the boundary of the project. Is the
organisation of transport to take staff to the blood bank within scope? Or,
should staff make their own way there? Deciding what's in or out of scope
will determine the amount of work which needs performing.
Understand who the stakeholders are, what they expect
to be delivered and enlist their support. Once you've defined the scope and
objectives, get the stakeholders to review and agree to them.
Define the deliverables
You must define what will be delivered by the project.
If your project is an advertising campaign for a new chocolate bar, then one
deliverable might be the artwork for an advertisement. So, decide what
tangible things will be delivered and document them in enough detail to
enable someone else to produce them correctly and effectively.
Key stakeholders must review the definition of
deliverables and must agree they accurately reflect what must be delivered.
Project planning
Planning requires that the project manager decides
which people, resources and budget are required to complete the project.
You must define what activities are required to
produce the deliverables using techniques such as Work Breakdown Structures.
You must estimate the time and effort required for each activity,
dependencies between activities and decide a realistic schedule to complete
them. Involve the project team in estimating how long activities will take.
Set milestones which indicate critical dates during the project. Write this
into the project plan. Get the key stakeholders to review and agree to the
plan.
Communication
Project plans are useless unless they've been
communicated effectively to the project team. Every team member needs to
know their responsibilities. I once worked on a project where the project
manager sat in his office surrounded by huge paper schedules. The problem
was, nobody on his team knew what the tasks and milestones were because he
hadn't shared the plan with them. The project hit all kinds of problems with
people doing activities which they deemed important rather than doing the
activities assigned by the project manager.
Tracking and reporting project progress
Once your project is underway you must monitor and
compare the actual progress with the planned progress. You will need
progress reports from project team members. You should record variations
between the actual and planned cost, schedule and scope. You should report
variations to your manager and key stakeholders and take corrective actions
if variations get too large.
You can adjust the plan in many ways to get the
project back on track but you will always end up juggling cost, scope and
schedule. If the project manager changes one of these, then one or both of
the other elements will inevitably need changing. It is juggling these three
elements - known as the project triangle - that typically causes a project
manager the most headaches!
Change management
Stakeholders often change their mind about what must
be delivered. Sometimes the business environment changes after the project
starts, so assumptions made at the beginning of the project may no longer be
valid. This often means the scope or deliverables of the project need
changing. If a project manager accepted all changes into the project, the
project would inevitably go over budget, be late and might never be
completed.
By managing changes, the 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 project success
because the project manager controls how the changes are incorporated, can
allocate resources accordingly and can plan when and how the changes are
made. Not managing changes effectively is often a reason why projects fail.
Risk management
Risks are events which can adversely affect the
successful outcome of the project. I've worked on projects where risks have
included: staff lacking the technical skills to perform the work, hardware
not being delivered on time, the control room at risk of flooding and many
others. Risks will vary for each project but the main risks to a project
must be identified as soon as possible. Plans must be made to avoid the
risk, or, if the risk cannot be avoided, to mitigate the risk to lessen its
impact if it occurs. This is known as risk management.
You don't manage all risks because there could be too
many and not all risks have the same impact. So, identify all risks,
estimate the likelihood of each risk occurring (1 - not likely, 2 - maybe
likely, 3 - very likely). Estimate its impact on the project (1 - low, 2 -
medium, 3 - high), then multiply the two numbers together to give the risk
factor. High risk factors indicate the severest risks. Manage the ten with
the highest risk factors. Constantly review risks and lookout for new ones
since they have a habit of occurring at any moment.
Not managing risks effectively is a common reason why
projects fail.
Summary
Following these best practices cannot guarantee a
successful project but they will provide a better chance of success.
Disregarding these best practices will almost certainly lead to project
failure.
About The Author
Simon Buehring is a project manager, consultant and
trainer. He works for KnowledgeTrain which offers Project Management
training courses in the UK and overseas. Simon has extensive experience
within the IT industry both in the UK and in Asia. He can be contacted via
the KnowledgeTrain website at
http://www.knowledgetrain.co.uk/.
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