Managing a project canst be daunting. Whether planning your wedding, developing a recent website or building your dream home by the sea, you want to employ project management techniques to help you succeed. I'll summarise the top 7 greatest practices at the heart of okay project management which could facilitate you too achieve project success.
Define the scope and objectives
Firstly, understand the project objectives. Mean your boss asks you to organise a blood donor campaign, is the objective to obtain as much blood donated as accomplishable? Or, is it too raises the local company profile? Deciding the actual objectives will help you blueprint 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 what the stakeholders are, who they expect to be delivered and enlist their support. Once you've defined the scope and objectives, acquire 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 recent chocolate bar, then one deliverable may be the artwork for an advertisement. So, choose what tangible things will be delivered and document those in enough detail too enable someone else to product those correctly and effectively.
Key stakeholders must review the definition of deliverables and must agree they accurately reflect who 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 decides a realistic schedule too fulfilled them. Involve the project team in estimating how prolonged activities will take. Set milestones which indicate critical dates during the project. pen this into the project plan. Obtain the key stakeholders too 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 understand their responsibilities. I once worked on a project where the project manager sat in his office surrounded by huge paper schedules. The predicament was, nobody on his team knew what the tasks and milestones were because he hadn't shared the blueprint with those. The project hit all kinds of calamities with individuals 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 want progress reports from project team members. You should copy variations between the real and planned cost, schedule and scope. You should report variations to your manager and key stakeholders and take corrective actions if variations get to large.
You can adjust the plan in many ways to acquire the project back on track but you will constantly finish up juggling cost, scope and schedule. If the project manager changes one of these, so one or both of the other elements will inevitably need changing. It is juggling those 3 elements known as the project triangle that typically causes a project manager the most headaches!
Change management
Stakeholders usually change their mind about who must be delivered. Sometimes the business environment changes subsequently the project starts, then assumptions created at the beginning of the project may nay longer be valid. This usually means the scope or deliverables of the project want changing. If a project manager accepted each change into the project, the project would inevitably go over budget, be off time and might never be completed.
By managing changes, the project manager can make decisions about whether or not to incorporate the changes at once or in the future, or to reject them. This increase the chances of project success because the project manager controls how the changes are incorporated canst allocate resources accordingly and could blueprint when and how the changes are created. Not managing changes effectively is usually a reason why projects fail.
Summary
Following those best practices cannot guarantee a successful project but they will provide a better option of success. Disregarding those greatest practices will almost certainly lead to project failure.
Author Resource:-
Uchenna Ani-Okoye is an internet marketing advisor
For more information you can visit change management best practices at http://www.changemanagementbestpractices.info
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