The Top Five Best Practices for successful Project Management

Managing a project can be a very daunting task. Whatever the project is, you will need to use some project management techniques in order to succeed. You can only apply them if you know the best practices that will help you succeed. This article will discuss the best practices in project management.

These best practices in project management will help you to achieve project success.

01. Definition of Objectives and Scope
The first step is to understand the scope of the project and its objectives. Without knowing the objective, then the whole project is doomed for failure. The scope of the project lets you know the boundary. Anything beyond that is irrelevant and shouldn’t be taken into consideration. Making a decision on what should and what shouldn’t be on the scope will determine the amount of work that needs to be done.
It is very important that you know who the stakeholders are and what they expect from your project. Once you have done that, you can have your stakeholders review them and agree with them.

02. Definition of the Deliverables
Your project shouldn’t just be hitting blanks. In order to succeed, you must define exactly what it is that your project will deliver. For example, if your project happens to be an advertising campaign for a new coffee brand, then one of the deliverable might be an artwork of the coffee advertisement. It is therefore very important that you determine tangible achievable targets and write record them so that it will be easier to deliver them at the end.

03. Project Planning
This is the most crucial part of the project management. At this stage, the project manager will have to make a decision about the people, resources and the budget that will be allocated to the project. You should be able to define the activities that are required to produce the deliverables. At this stage, you should also estimate the time and effort required for each set activity and based on the different activities, schedule their completion date.
Do not make all the decisions all alone, involve the project team and together deduce the time it will take to finish all the required activities. To ensure that the targets are met, set milestones so that the date for each project is met.

04. Communication to the project team
Even the best laid plans are bound to fail if it is not effectively communicated to others. Every team working on the project must know their responsibilities. If the team members don’t know their responsibilities, then there would be chaos and the whole project will be a failure.

05. Monitoring and Reporting your Project Progress
Now the planning process is over and the project is finally underway. It will be disastrous if you don’t keep track and report the progress of the project. You will need to record the planned progress from each team member. You should make it a necessity to record the variations between the actual and planned cost, schedule and scope. These reports should be passed on to the manager and the other stakeholders so that corrective measures can be taken along the way.
By keeping track of the progress, you can easily edit the plans in several ways so that the objective will be met at the end. You can edit the cost, scope and schedule and it is much easier if you are tracking the progress.

Conclusion.
If you can effectively follow these five steps in your project management, then your project will run more smoothly than when you don’t.

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