Business Management ABCs

Steps For Project Management

Diving up your business and clients into projects and setting up a Project Management Office (PMO) to run these projects is the latest trend in business. You can hire a Project Management Consultant to help set up a Project Management Office within the existing structure of your business. The PMC will train and monitor your staff and put together the project management team that will run all your projects in the future. There are 5 steps a Project Manager needs to take in order to ensure the success of a project. Each paragraph covers one step in the process.

The first step is setting the goal. You need to meet with the client and work on his or her needs and requirements from the project. Decide on a definite end date for the project. Understand the reason behind the client’s need for this project and the consequences of not meeting the deadline. Factor this into the calculation for the end date of the project. The end date will give you a focal point to work around and also to plan and allocate resources.

There are a lot of quotes on team work but one of my favorites is by Babe Ruth and it goes so “The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don’t play together, the club won’t be worth a dime.” Teamwork is fastest way to complete a project. Draw from your experiences from working with others in the company and choose the individuals who you think will be best for the project. If you are having a problem convincing your colleagues to help out, advertize within the organization and pick the best from those that show up. Remember it’s the quality not the quantity of the team that matters.

The next step is to decide the scope of the project. This will tell you what the project needs to deliver and needs to be documented in depth. Again you will need to work closely with your client on this to understand the requirements and then deliver on those fronts.

You need to determine the feasibility of the project next, i.e. you need to determine whether you can deliver the promised results with the resources currently available, within the specified timeframe. To determine this break the project up into smaller units with each unit being a step in the process to complete the task. Assign each unit to a person in the team and ask them to come up with a time scale. Use this information to clobber together a timeline and determine whether it fits the schedule and resources you have on hand. If any of the above resources do coincide with the values you have, you are going to have to ask for an increment in that area.

The last step is to execute the project. Now that you have planned everything, it is time to run the project. Keep tabs on the daily progress and deal with situations as they crop up. Keep the client in the loop with weekly progress reports. Also keep a tab on expenses and the use of resources.

In the last few years, Project Management Offices have become a very popular cure for companies’ project management problem.