Management is paramount to making any project successful, irrespective of the industry and the work scope. Resource allocation, meeting the time constraints, and ensuring quality standards of the end products. Moreover, there are varied aspects to manage to ensure successful project delivery. Only proficient experts with certified skillsets and hands-on experience in the project management domain can rest assured of getting the desired results within a stipulated time and set resources. These experts follow well-established principles of project management and efficiently manage the complexities to deliver expected end products. All the tasks in the project management process involve multiple steps and the use of various tools that help bring efficiency. If you plan to build a career in this domain, it is important for you to know everything about project management and the basic principles that can help in this domain.
What is Project Management?
Process management is a detailed process to plan, execute, and close the projects successfully. There is a need to efficiently manage each step, right from getting introduced to the projects until you deliver the products that cater to all the user requirements. This entire project management process involves the application and implementation of knowledge, skillsets, and techniques to meet project requirements within defined constraints. The crucial role in this whole process is that of the project managers. They have the skills and hands-on knowledge of the tools that work well in the project management process. Their role is not limited to this; they also coordinate with the team members, communicate with stakeholders, and ensure that the team adapts to any change that can bring positive results in project delivery. Now, there are certain project principles that the concerned person follows to get the best results. Let us discuss them in detail.
To Know more about different project management styles read Agile vs traditional Project Management.
12 Principles of Project Management
The program management principles are the fundamental rules that an expert or the team working on a project follows for efficient management. There are 12 fundamental principles that the teams follow. Some of them are listed below.
Principles of Project Management |
| Define the Project Structure | Create Change Management Plan |
| Set Clear Goals and Objectives | Monitor Progress |
| Create Risk Management Plan | Adjust Priorities |
| Implement the Right Capabilities | Finalize the Project |
| Communicate Roles and Expectations | Analyze Successes |
| Set Project Performance Baseline | Focus on Value Delivery |
abrarinspirationDefine the Project Structure
Structure is the well-explained outline of a project that defines all the key elements of it. When you have the structure right in front, it's easier to get an idea about the entire project and push it towards completion successfully. Thus, the first principle the experts follow is to define the project structure. While creating a project structure, there are three aspects that you should religiously include. These are:
Budget
It is about the amount of money you will spend on the project under question. You can decide the budget on the basis of available and required resource quantity.
Schedule
It refers to the timelines you will follow to complete the project on the whole and on each segment of the project. The experts usually divide the project into smaller units and allot a timeframe for each section, which becomes their schedule for the project.
Milestone
It refers to the outcome after a set time period. Each milestone inches the project closer to completion and signifies the team's success.
Set Clear Goals and Objectives
Goals refer to what you want to achieve through your project and the impact that you want to experience. If your objectives are clear and you know what you want to get as the end product, it becomes easier to strategize your moves accordingly and train your entire team to inch closer to the final targets. The proven methodology to set goals for your project is SMART criteria. It stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based. This criterion will help you set realistic goals with a minimum threshold. Once you achieve it, you can consider your project successful.
Create a Risk Management Plan
No matter how smoothly you keep your operations, there are always potential issues or problems with high chances of occurrence. Thus, the third principle is to keep a risk management plan ready. The project manager and other experts working on different project segments should have a strategy to identify the potential troubles. Furthermore, they should have a solution for each potential issue they are likely to face. It will save them from wasting time and resources in dealing with the problems, if at all they occur during the project execution.
Implement the Right Capabilities
You cannot hand over even a unit part of the project to someone incapable of completing it. Thus, it is a principle that the manager ensures everyone working on the project is capable enough to bring efficient results. Furthermore, they should have all the resources, like the tools and money required to work on a project. The right strategy they can use is to choose only those professionals with certified skills and prior experience in their domain. Based on the individual capabilities, assign the roles to every team member, and rest assured that efficiency will follow.
Communicate Roles and Expectations
Another significant principles of project management is communicating the roles and expectations to every team member. Everyone involved in the project must know about their roles and what is expected out of them. The project manager is responsible for conveying their roles and responsibilities to them and checking if they are standing tall on their expectations. Effective communication before the project commences reduces confusion and conflict between the team members. For example, if it is a software development project, make sure everyone in the team knows who is responsible for development and which team has to work on testing.
Set Project Performance Baseline
Every project has three fundamental components: cost, schedule, and scope. If you can achieve the final product by keeping these components within the set value, you can consider it as a success. Each of these three components should have a performance baseline, the aggregation of which is called the project performance baseline. If you make any changes in any one of these three components, the impact will be directly visible in the other two. To put it in perspective, if you change the scope of a project, you will have to make significant changes in the cost and the schedule. Thus, it is fair to say that the project performance baseline impacts the decision-making, and it is fruitful to set it before the execution starts.
Create a Change Management Plan
Change is inevitable. If you have managed enough projects lately, you know that your clients can demand a change at any point during the project execution. You require a change management plan to conveniently accommodate the changes without affecting the existing project setup. Thus, it is one of the most crucial principles of project management and practices to keep a change management plan in hand. Use expert advice and interference to identify potential change requests and build a change management plan to accommodate any change smoothly.
Monitor Progress
It is crucial to verify that the strategies you have planned and the work that your team is doing are contributing to project success. Furthermore, you have to check and ensure that your project is running on a set timeline and you are not lagging in any manner. So, the project manager should request all the team leads to provide a report of the work they have completed in a set time duration. They should review these reports thoroughly to ensure every team is on track and following the time frame religiously. The project managers can fix a schedule for the review meeting to monitor progress and ensure that no team member is falling behind the pre-decided project schedule.
Adjust Priorities
There are multiple factors in a project, due to which the priorities may also change. It can happen due to ever-changing requests of the clients or budget restrictions that might arise due to negligent resource usage. The principles of project management that the managers have to focus on here is to adjust priorities. They should make adjustments to the project based on task priorities that might keep changing during the project lifecycle. It will help mitigate the potential risks that might arise upon every requested change. This way, the managers will immediately adjust the projects every time you get a change request.
Finalize the Project
The finalization stage is crucial for a project manager. That is when he has to ensure that the team has catered to every requirement and that the quality of end products is premium. So, once the team announces the work as complete, the managers should review the entire project and send it to the stakeholders. Here, the stakeholders might ask for a few additional changes. Once you have made those changes and got the approval of the stakeholders, your project can be considered final or complete.
Analyze Successes
Once you reach the project completion stage, managers get a chance to do a deeper analysis of the entire project lifecycle. This analysis helps them identify the areas of improvement and teach multiple lessons. All this information helps them in future projects. The right approach during this stage is to sit with your team, discuss every project aspect, and allow everyone to share their feedback. Discuss everything in detail and build a list of suggestions you can use in the upcoming projects to achieve excellence in them.
Focus on Value Delivery
Lastly, focus on value delivery as a part of successful project completion. Ensure your emphasis is on keeping the resources in excellent and optimum condition. For example, if you use scheduling software, you should use an updated version and the one with all the advanced features. Furthermore, you should only rely on mature processes to push your projects towards ultimate success. Understand that these are resources that your team must have to reach ultimate project success.
Pursuing PMI certifications can further enhance these skills and knowledge.
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What defines Project success?
On the face of it, completing a project on time and within budget can be defined as project success. But project success goes beyond these two parameters. A project is successful if it helps deliver what the stakeholder wants, in terms of quality and requirements. Project success is about how well you have handled the stakeholders during the project—in context to being open and transparent and taking them along in the project development journey. Project success is also measured in terms of how happy your team is at the end of the project.
Let us look at some of the parameters that define project success:
- Project scope: The project has delivered what it had intended to in terms of requirements mentioned by the stakeholders.
- Project schedule and cost: The project has been completed on time and not exceeded budgets.
- Satisfied teams: The team was happy, motivated, and involved in the project and operated in an environment that helped the team to deliver the best.
- Happy customers: The stakeholders got what they expected, in terms of quality and quantity. Happy customers will keep coming back and this in turn will help raise organizational reputation in the market.
Conclusion
Project management is crucial, and any strategy you use to handle your projects has to be well-thought and efficient. If only the management strategies are apt, the final results will be as desired, and growth will follow. That is why companies hire experts who thoroughly understand at least the basic project management principles and their implementation. So, if you plan to build a fruitful career as a project manager, consider taking a certified training program to gain hands-on knowledge of the project management domain. Make sure you understand the principles of project management well and implement them while managing a project for better results. It will help prove your worth as a manager and can fetch you excellent work opportunities that are monetarily secure. So, plan things well and experience all the perks of a promising professional career.
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