Project Management
You need strong strategies for project management to guide you through the process and keep your project moving on schedule. Aspiring to a finished product without any strategy prepares your project for uncontrolled changes in scope and destabilizing risks.
These five project management strategies will help you create an efficient and repeatable plan for each new project.
Table of Contents
Strategy 1: Clarify The Details Of Your Project Before Starting
Before you start programming the project, you have to know what it entails. Start with the final product and work backward. What smaller steps and products do you have to complete to get to the final product? Take the time to understand what you have to achieve and what resources you will need to make it happen. As you clarify the details of your project, you should commit to a project management methodology and begin to build a project plan based on that methodology.
Strategy 2: Evaluate Your Project From Various Perspectives
During the planning phase, take a step back and look at the project from the perspective of different roles. Each will face challenges that may not be apparent at first glance. Project management strategies in construction, for example, will look different for a foreman than for an architect or site engineer. Your project plan has to take into account the needs of each role and anticipate the common problems that each could face. It’s easy to get lost in the face of potential gaps and missed opportunities in your own project plan, so it can be helpful to have non-participating team members scrutinize it to see if they discover anything that you may have overlooked.
Strategy 3: Choose The Right People To Be Part Of The Project Team
A project can only be as effective as the people who work on it. Each team member should be chosen for the skills and personalities they bring to the project. Not everyone will be a good fit for any project, and your best team may not even include all of your “best” people.
The overlapping of incompatible skill sets and personalities will slow down, or even completely derail, a project. But approaching staff from the perspective of “Who is the best for this project?” it will make the process much smoother.
Strategy 4: Set Achievable Milestones To Measure Progress
Large projects run the risk of drifting off course or falling behind if they don’t have specific milestones that can be measured in the process. Setting milestones breaks a project down into frequent checkpoints. You can use them to assign your team responsibility for each milestone and adjust the schedule for the entire project on the fly.
Setting milestones is also a great stakeholder management strategy . If you have progress points with set due dates throughout the project, you can inform stakeholders about the progress of the project, without having to try to explain each task and its relationship to the project as a whole.
Strategy 5: Evaluate Your Process After Completing The Project
After project reports, analysis of results, retrospectives, or whatever you want to call it, you have to evaluate the project once it is finished. Analyze beyond whether it was a success or a failure. See every milestone and every step you took to reach it.
First, celebrate your victories. What worked and what do you want to replicate in the future? Next, identify the moments when your process failed: what can you change in the next project to avoid the same problems? This review will help you hone your project management process and make your future projects even better.
