Project Management Steps

 

All projects, whether large or small, need good project management. While larger and complex projects will require more detailed planning and more intensive monitoring, it will still boil down to following a set of project management steps to ensure that all considerations have been addressed and possible risks mitigated. Projects that skip some or most of these steps tend to lack direction and focus, be disorganized and more vulnerable to failure. Conversely, following these steps ensure that a project will run as smoothly as possible and meet stated expectations and delivery targets successfully.

 

Key Project Management Steps

 

Delineate Scope and Context

The first and most basic of all the project management steps is delineating the scope and context of the project. This means understanding exactly what the project is supposed to accomplish. It is also equally important to establish what is outside the project scope.project management steps This will protect from the tendency toward trying to do too much and losing focus. This will also facilitate acceptance of the need to re-plan and re-cost the project if major changes to the scope are demanded by clients or stakeholders. A clearly delineated scope should make it easy to identify which business areas, processes and resources that will be affected by the project. Objectives, goals and detailed planning will all derive from this basic understanding so getting the scope clear right from the start will be imperative to accomplishing the later project management steps.

 

Identify Stakeholders and Sponsors

A clearly delineated scope will also make it easier to identify stakeholders and get them to make a commitment to the project. This requires the scope to make a persuasive case for the benefits of the project. These need to be stated as business benefits, not simply technical solutions that will address a need. The stakeholders are the people who will really benefit from the successful completion of the project so ideally, they should be the project’s strongest advocates and sponsors. If possible, identify specific people from the stakeholders who have sufficient organizational clout to be able to argue for the project at the senior management level. If this is not possible, another person will have to enlisted to help sustain management support for the project for each of the project management steps, from project initiation to close.

 

Define Project Goals and Objectives

Once the scope is delineated and the stakeholders identified, specific project objectives can be defined. These are lower level, more specific technical and business objectives that should each contribute to the achievement of the much larger overall project goal. It is important to state each of the objectives as specifically as possible so that they can be evaluated for doability. No project ever has enough resources, but it is important that objectives are realistically doable with the available resources. Another benefit to specific objectives is that they can serve as the framework for the project’s high-level plan.

 

Plan in Detail and Document

Even managing small projects require a detailed, written and well-documented plan. This plan should clearly state the project scope, identify stakeholders, list goal and objectives, schedules, budget, constraints, deliverables and most importantly, define what success is and how it will be measured. More specifically, it should list the following:

  • The different phases of the project
  • The tasks for each phase of the project
  • Roles, responsibilities and schedules – who is responsible for each task, how long will it take and what are the target start and end dates
  • The tangible and measurable deliverables for each task or each phase

Depending on the size of the project and the resources of the organization, this plan may be done on paper, using planning software or even in an online project collaboration site. Whatever the format, the initial draft of this plan should be made available to all stakeholders and participants for evaluation. After revisions are incorporated from feedback, everybody must sign off their approval on the document to signal the go-ahead for the project.

 

Implement the Plan

A plan, no matter how detailed, will need to be managed and monitored during its implementation. Because so many different people are typically involved, the project management process requires that people, not just resources, process and schedules, are managed. This makes implementation the most demanding of all the project management steps because it requires that relationships, dependencies and potential conflict between all participants be constantly managed. These participants include stakeholders, management, administrative staff, financial planners, technical personnel, operations crews, suppliers, contractors, third party consultants and end users.

Managing the diverse interests of all the project participants to successfully complete the projects requires two important things: controls and communications. Controls processes consisting of monitoring, analysis and corrections ensure that the project is going well and target deliverables meet expectations. Constant, regular and scheduled communications are the key to making these processes work. Meetings must be held regularly to keep everybody in the loop and review adherence to timetables and standards. Processes, deliverables and milestones must each be evaluated, tested and verified to be within acceptable parameters. These regular reviews would ensure that issues are identified and addressed as early as possible and corrections implemented to processes or even the project plan. Reports must be regularly provided to inform stakeholders and participants of the project status as well as prepare end-users for product or system implementation.

 

Close the Project

Many organizations fail to give project endings the same importance as the rest of the other project management steps. This is too bad since closing a project well contributes to the morale of the organization and the success of future projects. Project evaluation will logically follow from the regular reviews during implementation. Properly done, this process should be constructive and will provide insights on what processes worked well and which needs improvement. Provide feedback to departments and participants, document insights and lessons learned for consideration on future projects. Finally, it is important to always celebrate the end of a project. After the project has been turned over to support and is made operational, celebrating would be a good way to get rid of any lingering tension and recharge for the next big project.