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Managing your first project brings one realization into stark relief: the chasm between theory and practice. All the information you learned from project management examples, courses, and books seems a million miles away in the face of your initial real-world project.
The most important thing is to stick to the project management basics even as you feel like you're herding cats.
Our first tip for project managers is to define the project's scope: its deliverables. If project scope is not clearly defined, project creep will likely result from ongoing changes and/or expansion of the project’s deliverables.
Excessive scope creep kills many projects as they go over budget and miss deadlines due to an ever-moving deliverables target.
Changes to any corner of the project management triangle -- the schedule is shortened, the scope is redefined, or the budget is reduced -- affect the other two corners and the quality of the final deliverables.
Write a project scope statement up front to define the project's scope, time, and budget. A project scope statement should identify:
Other actions to take include:
A cross-functional team, composed of people from multiple departments or with varying skill sets, will contribute to your project's success. Team members with different backgrounds and perspectives will help you avoid groupthink and siloing while increasing innovation.
Project manager responsibilities include defining the key roles, responsibilities, and functions of each team member. Then, identify people with the hard skills set to fill each team position. There is more, however, to assembling an effective cross-functional team than technical skill sets.
The more complex a project, the more critical a work breakdown structure (WBS) is for workload management. Once this is established, you can incorporate it into project tracking software as we'll discuss in the next step.
A WBS begins with the final deliverables and works backward by subdividing them into smaller components regarding time, responsibility, and size to create a project roadmap.
For example, if you were designing a training course, first identify the outcomes: the knowledge/skills people will learn. Then, identify the individual content blocks that lead to those outcomes.
Finally, schedule time for each content block based on the total time allotted for the course. This WBS doesn't mandate how material is taught, only the content necessary to reach those outcomes.
One boon for project managers over the last 20 years is the development of project management software. Successful project managers use software such as Basecamp or Trello to organize projects, communicate with their teams and stakeholders, and produce progress reports.
Make the time to learn your project management software's ins and outs before you and your team begin working on a project. This software can have a steep learning curve, so signing up for formal training will save you time later.
If that's impossible, work through available online training materials, documentation, videos, webinars, and user forums until you're familiar enough with it to be a resource for other team members.
Most project management software will adjust the due dates of all upcoming tasks in your project schedule if an earlier task's date is changed.
Managing projects requires effective communication with your team and external stakeholders. Face-to-face and electronic communications should follow the Goldilocks Rule: frequent enough to keep everyone informed without becoming a time drain for anyone.
Everyone must know and use the same project management terms to ensure clear communication. Most project management software also allows you to archive project-related emails and meeting minutes to refer to and share as needed.
Test your deliverables at each critical milestone before moving forward. You must discover problems sooner rather than later to avoid taking several steps backward.
Effective testing also:
Multiple testing methods exist, and the specific testing situation will dictate which one(s) to use, such as automated, compatibility, functional, integration, manual, regression, stress, or others. All testing, no matter which methods you use, has three steps:
You'd love to move on to your next project -- after a brief break -- once you hand off the deliverables. Before you do that, however, conducting a project post-mortem, also known as an after-action review (AAR), is essential. A post-mortem captures what worked well and what could be done better for future projects.
Post-mortems ask open-ended questions:
An effective post-mortem has two response components: individual and group. Individual responses, which can be via survey, questionnaire, or interview, encourage team members to speak candidly. A group meeting after you've collected individual responses allows everyone to share their thoughts and respond to others' remarks.
Your first few projects will always be nerve-wracking as you develop successful project management skills. Stick to the basics and the project manager tips above to meet all your project management goals on schedule and under budget.
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