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Change Management Can Lead to Rigidity and Resistance to Change
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Project Management Success with the Top 7 Best Practices
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 and consultant and has
extensive experience within the IT industry in the UK and Asia.
His company KnowledgeTrain offers project management training courses in the UK. He
can be contacted via KnowledgeTrain.
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