The Story Behind the Successful Project!

As a professional at the bus stop waiting for my way to the office as a fresher, with new dreams, thinking of making a career growth, I thought about all the new experiences I would learn from my first job. The very first office environment provides the experiences, skills, and fundamentals that form the basis for solving real-world problems as a professional.

As project management professionals, it helps us go back to "Our Basics" and brainstorm some key lessons that we may have left behind in the name of accelerating the delivery or bearing too many projects. The solid fundamentals and certain vital factors rely on each other to deliver a successful project.

In this blog, let us discuss and adopt project management learned in the first job or primary to examine the essential fundamentals for successful project delivery. This article takes you through specific real-time scenarios to make mistakes and learn from them. There will be a few helpful tool links to implement in your projects.

Define the scope

The scope statement is the primary document that identifies the deliverables within and outside the project's content.

It's a lead document because you can use it to hammer out the objectives deliverables and clarify presumptions. In my very second project, I skipped this document because the result seemed obvious. There would have been fewer bottlenecks during project execution if I had prepared the project's scope and further screened it with the project stakeholders. As a Project manager, make sure to have good practice to define project scope as it helps identify project boundaries.

The scope of the project should include the following:

• Project objective
• Key requirements
• Milestones
• Resource planning
• Expected outcome
• Sustainability plan

The Project objective section defines the measurable elements like attainable, time-bound, and goal, and the Key requirement section clarifies what the project needs to meet. Milestones, assuming the committed dates that need to be tracked. Resource planning allows you to map the resources on what the project demands. Expected outcomes and sustainability go hand in hand. Always have a five-year sustainable plan for any project.

Perform stakeholder analysis

Stakeholder analysis is used to evaluate people's needs and impact on a project. This analysis will help one understand the process, the mindset, priority and identify the stakeholder. There should not be any gap of assumptions whether the person is from management or assistant level regarding power, communication, and interest needs. Understanding your stakeholders can help you develop a plan of action that will work seamlessly with them as the project develops.

Three essential steps need to follow in stakeholder analysis:

1) Identifying the key stakeholders and their attentiveness (positive or negative) in the project;

2) Assessing the supremacy of, the significance of, and measure of impact upon each stakeholder; and

3) Identifying how best to occupy stakeholders.

Stakeholder analysis is essential to remove barriers and reveal the project's progression. It also terminates the bottleneck in delivering successful projects by getting a vast amount of information about project champions, opponents, and their levels of importance in the project.

Communicate and initiate a project plan

The project plan is the project milestone and the roadmap towards the goal. The project manager creates the blueprint, including the strategy, schedule, scope, constraints, WBS (Work Break Down Structure), risk analysis, or change management.

It does not matter if the project is a new or existing website or a brand new building—the project planning phase provides a blueprint and acts as a one-hand tool of reference throughout the project. Project planning provides direction by asking/answering questions like:

• What product(s) or service(s)?
• How much will the project budget be?
• How to meet the expectations of our client/stakeholders?
• How will delivery be analyzed?

Post-meeting, all the necessary details for the project plan satisfy the successful plan statement.

At this stage of project planning, it is necessary to use a technic or a tool called six thinking hats, which is used to boost the creative mindset by dividing the different ways of thinking into six hats. It's used to decide on logic, caution, emotion, creativity, optimism, and control. A discrete can use the six thinking hats by oneself by necessitating themselves to "game" the role of each hat, or six different individuals can play each role. It is one interactive and engaging activity that will bond the team.

Reviewing Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)

Since my project management career started, Work Break Down Structure has been the default tool used while managing projects. I was using multiple tools to break down my larger tasks into smaller sub-tasks, two of the most common ways to operate in a spreadsheet by creating a Gantt chart or using one PM tool, such as ASANA and so on. It makes life easy for PMs and the mapped resources to manage tasks that add value to a project milestone.

Some project teams like to hop right into milestones; that works fine for smaller tasks/projects. However, for larger or complex projects, preparing a WBS will help the project manager identify and organize the critical work smooth-running that needs to be reported and tracked in the different stages of the project. I will often keep circulating the WBS to my peer fellows at regular intervals to remind the scope that needs to be delivered.

Keeping track of Actions, Risks, and Issues

Any project needs more attention to deliver the results fruitful. It is vital to track the project's issues, actions, and risks as a project manager. However, maintaining, managing, and follow-ups are tedious jobs. I've been on multiple projects where many of us spent hours together reviewing the risk/issue log while the discussion was only supposed to take less than 30 minutes.

Its best practice to keep track of all the risks, actions, and issues, critical decisions is a managerial challenge, but it's a risk and issue management process for the core team. We need to review and discuss with the team every week; by doing this activity, you will see the project where you need to respond and take tasks seamlessly forward.

I've seen these logs maintained in different setouts, including spreadsheet templates, online project management tools, and shared in document repositories. Preferably you can route these three factors in a collaborative tool so that the project manager is not the only one maintaining the log.

Minutes Of Meeting (MOM)

Minutes Of Meeting can be an administrative drag, but they provide a suitable meeting summary, drive responsibility, and thrive through follow-ups. It is unnecessary to take notes for every meeting, but I document them for critical meetings where resolution is needed and mandatory additional follow-up actions.

There are two ways I used to keep from typing up meeting minutes twice are copying the follow-ups from the action log or using a mind map for my minutes.

Review the critical path and update the project milestone

Every project manager understands the value of a project schedule and has heard of the critical path. I'm not going to bug you why you need a timetable to estimate finish dates or make you calculate the vital route. However, it's critical to keep the project schedule updated regularly.

I've gone weeks without updating the project schedule and assumed I was still on track, and I've had other project managers submit outdated plans. We get so busy as project managers that we forget about critical administrative chores to the project's success.

Here's how I work: I set an hour on my calendar to do the administrative updates. Of course, using technology like Basecamp or ASANA reduces the amount of administration because the project team updates the schedule as they work on the project tasks. You'll have to manually track and update the plan if you don't use a collaborative scheduling tool. After you've revised the schedule, look at the critical route to see whether any tasks that have a direct impact on a key milestone or project completion date have slipped. Remember that the critical path is the longest in the project schedule formed by activities. If the vital route descends by one day, your project will be delayed.

Not the first time you've heard something like this

I'm sure you've already heard these six teachings. They aren't likely to be revolutionary ideas that will change how you handle your tasks. They are, nonetheless, fundamental lessons that are beneficial to initiatives. When we're juggling several projects, attending too many meetings, and being forced to trade-off processes for project management priorities, the issue for project managers today is to implement these skills continuously.

It all comes down to the fundamentals when it comes to project delivery. We'll be better equipped to tackle the next project or improve the current one if we go back to school, examine these essential principles, and re-commit to them.

Conclusion:

For the organization to govern the project, project management is critical. To build a successful project plan, a team leader must understand the project lifecycle, risk, and change management. Furthermore, using the appropriate technology during process time estimation while considering the iron triangle might help the project achieve its target.

However, team project managers must remember that if the project fails to meet its objectives, they must know when to call it a day before going over budget.