Management
The Art of Project Management
The most important practice of any good project management is to define the scope and objectives of your project. To be successful, must first understand what the goal of the project is. If you were going to organize a campaign to get your colleagues to work in the local food pantry, what is your ultimate goal? Is it to get as much goods as possible donated to this food pantry? Is it to raise the awareness of the pantry within the community? Deciding what the real objective is will help you to determine how you go about planning and managing the project.
The project manager needs to define the scope of the project. For example, determining if transporting employees to the food pantry falls within the scope of the project. Or, will they be responsible for getting there on their own? Deciding which activities are within the scope or outside the scope of the project has a big impact on the work required.
To achieve the desired outcome from the project, you must define what is to be delivered by the end of the project. It is important to decide what will be delivered and have detailed documentation of what these things are. Ultimately, someone will end up doing the work to produce the end result, so it needs to be clearly described.
Once you have defined the outcome, you will need to have the key players review the work and agree that it accurately reflects what they expect as the outcome of the project. Planning requires that the project manager decides which people, resources and budget are required to complete the project. You will need to estimate the time and effort required to complete each activity, maintain a realistic schedule to complete the activities. It’s always a good idea to involve the project team in estimating how long the activities will take since they will be the ones actually doing the work. Make sure all of this is in the project plan document. Everyone on the team needs to know exactly what is expected of them, what their responsibilities are, and what they are accountable for.
When you have an agreed upon plan, and your project is underway you will need to constantly monitor the actual progress of the project against the plan. If your project gets off track, you may have to rearrange the order of tasks or add more staff to the project or reduce the scope if need be It is a constant struggle to balance the cost, scope and schedule- often referred to as the project triangle - and it generally creates the most frustration for the project manager.
Remember, project management is an art. If your project starts out using all the best practices, you may not be able to guarantee that it will come in under budget or even on time, for that matter. You will, however, have a better chance of delivering your project successfully if you do apply the best practices to your project.
