Because of the ever-growing array of huge, complex, and technically challenging projects in today’s world, project management has become a critical skill. People need special tools, techniques, and knowledge to handle their project management assignments, such as confirming a project’s justification, developing project objectives and schedules, and maintaining commitment for a project.
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Confirming Your Project’s Justification
A key requirement for project management success is knowing why the project was created in the first place. In addition to helping ensure that the appropriate objectives and desired results are framed at the outset, this knowledge energizes project team members and fuels their commitment to achieve those objectives and results. Take the following steps to determine your project’s justification:
Identify your project’s drivers, and determine their needs and expectations. (Project drivers are people for whom you perform the project; they have some authority to define the results of the project.)
Look for existing statements that confirm your project’s support of your organization’s priorities. Consult your organization’s long-range plan, annual budget, capital appropriations plan, and key performance indicators, or KPIs, as well as notes from meetings where your project was proposed and discussed. Also contact the people who attended those meetings.
When checking with people or written documents for confirmation of your project’s justification, do the following:
Try to find several sources for the same piece of information (the more independent sources you find that contain the same information, the more likely that information is correct).
Whenever possible, get information from primary sources (a primary source contains the original information; a secondary source is someone else’s report of the information from the primary source).
Whenever you can, use written sources because they provide a constant and enduring record of the information and they reduce the chances that the information will be altered, filtered, or misinterpreted (inadvertently or purposely) before you see it.
When speaking with people about important information, arrange to have at least one other person present. Doing so allows two different people to interpret what they heard from the same individual.
Write down all information you obtain from personal meetings.
Plan to meet with key audiences at least two times. Your first meeting gets them to start thinking about issues; your second meeting gives you a chance to clarify any ambiguities or inconsistencies from the first session.
Whenever possible, confirm what you heard in personal meetings with written sources. Compare people’s perceptions and opinions to written, factual data (from primary sources, if possible), and reconcile any discrepancies.
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Developing Meaningful Project Objectives
As a project manager, developing concise and unambiguous project objectives (or statements of your project’s desired results) increases the chances that you’ll successfully accomplish them. Follow these pointers to ensure your project objectives are crystal clear:
Focus on outcomes rather than activities. (For example, “produce a final, approved report” is preferable to “read and review draft report.”)
Make sure your objectives are SMART (specific, measurable, aggressive, realistic, and time-sensitive).
Use clear language — no technical jargon or acronyms.
Make sure every objective has at least one measure and every measure has at least one performance target. (For example, if the narrative statement of your objective is “to develop a new product,” one measure would be “target completion date” and the performance target for that measure would be “August 15, 20__.”)
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Creating Achievable Project Schedules
Producing your project’s results on schedule is an essential requirement for its success. To have the greatest chance of completing your project on time, you need to develop a project schedule that’s achievable, responsive to your client’s needs, and understood and supported by all project team members. Take the following steps to create a realistic and attainable project schedule:
Identify all required activities.
Break down activities into sufficient detail. For example, instead of including a single activity named “determine requirements for new product” in your schedule, break it down further into “review correspondence,” “interview salespeople,” “conduct focus groups,” and “prepare a report of the requirements for the new product.”
Always consider both duration (the number of work periods required to perform an activity) and interdependencies (the order in which activities are performed) as you develop your project schedule.
Identify your strategy for performing each activity before you estimate its duration.
Factor in the availability of resources (such as the number of hours each day in May that the manufacturing engineer will be able to work on your project).
Recognize and write down all assumptions related to your project and its schedule. For example, if you don’t yet know what your project budget is, write down that you’ll assume your budget will be $100,000 until you find out otherwise.
Identify and plan for all significant project schedule risks (such as whether the redesign of the company financial system will cause your project to be delayed).
Reexamine and revise, if necessary, your original schedule after your project is approved and before you start work on it.
Involve your project drivers (people for whom you perform the project) and supporters (people who help perform your project) in developing the schedule.
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Eliciting and Sustaining Commitment for Your Project
You can’t do your project alone; as project manager, you need your team members to work together to successfully reach the project’s final objectives and goals. Follow these tips to bring enthusiasm and commitment to your project team (and to maintain them throughout your project’s life cycle):
Clarify project benefits for the organization and for individual team members.
Involve team members in the planning process.
Help people see that the project plan is feasible.
Address issues, concerns, and questions promptly and openly.
Provide frequent, meaningful feedback to your team members.
Acknowledge people’s contributions.
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Source:http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/project-management-for-dummies-cheat-sheet.html
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