Project management involves employing special techniques and frameworks to ensure projects are completed on time, within budget, and to the desired quality standards. Discover more in our “What Is Project Management?” guide as well as related research papers, blogs articles and resources available online.
At this stage, you’ll outline your scope, create a project plan, identify key deliverables, set deadlines and develop communication and risk management plans and strategies.
Definition
Project management refers to a set of processes and tools used to successfully oversee complex projects in fields like engineering, construction, healthcare IT or other disciplines to achieve specific goals.
Manage the scope of a project is an integral component of project administration. This requires identifying what elements make up and define a project, creating a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), monitoring changes within it, and overseeing any necessary modifications or amendments to ensure projects stay on schedule, on budget and reduce risks.
Scope
Project management involves gathering teams with appropriate expertise to carry out work. A plan must include everything from project scope, milestones, and budget.
This process also accounts for the fact that projects tend to change throughout, an unavoidable occurrence. Project managers must be able to respond to this with consistent reforecasting and scheduling techniques like schedule crashing and fast tracking; tools such as project calendars, gantt charts and resource schedules may be helpful here as well.
Budget
Project budgets are an integral component of project management plans, as they outline projected revenues and expenses over an anticipated timeframe. Project budgets play an essential role in ensuring project success.
From the outset of any project, it is critical to establish and communicate a detailed budget with stakeholders and key people involved in its completion. Doing this promotes visibility and transparency while helping prevent problems down the road.
Risks
Risk identification is one of the first steps in project management, entails creating a list of all risks which could possibly threaten to hinder its outcome and structure. Risks should then be prioritized according to their likelihood and impact on the project.
There are both positive and strategic risks. Positive risks include using competitive advantages to your project’s advantage or taking advantage of favorable environmental conditions; strategic risks come from errors in strategy that lead to loss of resources or profit for the business, so project managers must educate themselves on risk analysis and best practices before risk becomes an issue.
Issues
Project managers must have the ability to assess and address team-related issues as they arise, such as performance monitoring, quality inspection, or communication issues.
A good project manager ensures their team has all of the skills needed to carry out their duties effectively, which helps the group grow, enhance overall quality and reduce employee churn.
Project managers need software that facilitates their process and minimizes time spent on repetitive tasks. Such an app should allow for simple planning and scheduling, take past track records into consideration and notify relevant people if a project deviates from its path.
Deliverables
Project Deliverables are tangible or intangible results of project activities that provide results and benefits, agreed upon by stakeholders during project planning stage.
Stakeholders can utilize these documents to communicate and track progress among themselves and keep a tab on progress.
Intangible project deliverables may include training programs or software tools designed to manage projects. These can help increase productivity. Project management software assists in aligning stakeholder expectations, providing a common communication platform and supporting change management efficiently.
Dependencies
Dependencies are an integral component of project management, helping you develop an agenda that takes into account all tasks and activities related to your work.
There are various kinds of dependencies, and these dependencies can be affected by both internal and external influences. For example, waiting on an outside supplier to deliver materials directly to your business can be considered an external dependency.
Other dependencies can be internal. For example, teams often must complete one task before beginning another – this is called finish-to-start dependency and often seen in construction projects.
Change Requests
Change requests refer to any work that must be added, removed or altered from a project plan. It’s essential that projects implement a clearly documented change request process as this helps monitor budgets, schedules and quality of deliverables more effectively.
Each change should be submitted using a form and evaluated, depending on its importance to the project manager and key stakeholders. Once approved or rejected by them, the change should be recorded in a change log for future reference.
Post-Implementation Review
Post-implementation reviews are an essential step, yet many businesses overlook this step. Without it, businesses risk repeating past errors or wasting valuable resources and time on projects that do not deliver expected benefits.
There are various methods for conducting an analysis. You could review project paperwork to gather tangible evidence on what went well or went wrong, while ProjectManager offers tasks that collect comments and supporting documents to collect all the needed data.