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With solid project management, companies can develop new products or services, optimize internal business operations, and provide customers with value — all with less friction and more efficiency. However, without the right building blocks in place, a lack of innovation and a drain on time and money can quickly follow suit.
To help you succeed with project management, we’ve put together eight tips to propel your organization instead of holding it back:
Invest in the initiation and planning stages
Pick the right framework or methodology for your project
Promote a culture of transparency and ownership
Decide on a realistic scope
Prioritize efficient scheduling
Practice effective resource management
Engage your stakeholders
Choose next-level project management tools and software
Let’s delve into each one to understand why they are so important together with best practice tips.
When it comes to answering, “Why do projects fail?”, many of the reasons can be traced back to poor planning and research—crucial parts of the initiating and planning stages of the project life cycle.
By establishing, syncing, and agreeing on key aspects such as organizational priorities, objectives, and requirements early on, there is less of a chance for confusion on them later.
The second step toward successful project management is finding the right framework or methodology. Project management methodologies describe a set of guiding principles and processes that are used to plan, manage, and execute projects.
Whether you choose the critical path methodology or Waterfall, these frameworks determines how work is prioritized and completed, as well as the way it is visualized.
Transparency can make all the difference when managing a project as complexities and sensitivities arise. With a strong culture of transparency in place, team members and leaders can rely on each other to raise flags or take ownership of their work regardless of how granular or stressful plans get.
This starts with clear communication, so each contributor can understand your long-term goals, KPIs (key performance indicators), and plans—as well as where they fit into the puzzle. One way to achieve this is to involve every employee at some level in the planning process, and give them ownership over tasks and deliverables by using a solid project management workflow, which you can create with a Work OS platform.
Scope creep, which is essentially unforeseen work or changes to plans that come up, is one of the main challenges project managers face. While this could be related to uncontrollable factors throughout a project, having the right people at the planning table can help you more accurately define project scope that prevents things from going off track.
One way you can set realistic scope is to refer back to old project data to make projections.
If you want your team to stay productive, you need to create work schedules that are realistic to your team’s workloads and the intended delivery date. Balancing these two factors is a worthwhile investment of your time.
Fundamentally, clearly communicated schedules mitigate delays and costly setbacks. The type of project management methodology you use shapes communication and can affect the way your team uses its time to reach a goal. If you use an Agile framework like Scrum, you will focus on the short-term and smaller deliverable increments. It’s also important to schedule time for things you don’t plan for.
6. Practice effective resource management
Resource management is an important tenet of project management and describes the process of pre-planning, scheduling, and allocating your resources to maximize efficiency.
In the physical sense, resource management could be explained through the example of a contractor managing construction projects — they could decide to book a concrete pourer for two sites in lieu of having to pay the cost for two at the same time.
For digital projects, resources often refer to specific employees or teams. A graphic designer may have several concurrent projects, so you’ll need to plan with them in order to get the job done. The list goes on to include any number of resources including people, capital, and other material goods.
A stakeholder is someone directly invested in the project’s success. They could be a key client, internal product user, executive, or product manager. In order to garner their support—financial or otherwise— that fuels a project, teams and project managers shouldn’t skimp on any work needed for their projects.
Communication and input between these two parties should be established before, during, and after a project. Why? Because each offers unique insights and perspectives relative to the organization’s goals and the team’s capabilities.
Finally, to succeed in the modern world of remote work, inter-departmental collaboration, cloud file sharing, and 1,000 other variables unique to your company, you need a modern Work OS platform. In short, monday.com offers a complete toolkit for every project and is built on an easy-to-use Work OS. The Work OS lets you shape workflows your way, boosting your team’s efficiency, and productivity by customizing any workflow to fit your needs. This gives you the freedom to work in whatever project management framework you prefer.
Resource: monday.com
