Tips for Project Management Success

Numerous factors are involved in a project's success. Following are some high level points:

- Full support from management
- Correct leadership style depending upon the skills, project type, and organizational environment
- Involvement of all the skakeholders right in the beginning
- Critical success factors have been identified and agreed upon with the key stakeholders
- Project benefits are well understood
- A detailed project plan exists
- Subsidiary plans should be in place: risk, communication, resources, schedule, scope, procurement
- Right processes for execution of the project
- List of key deliverables clearly defined
- Everyone understands their roles and responsibilities
- Continuous monitoring and control: periodic reviews of processes, risks, scope, budget, schedule, and issues.
- Sign-off on all the internal and customer deliverables

A realistic and achievable plan prepared with consensus of the project management team shall definitely be a solid postive step towards project success.

During my career of managing multiple projects across Asia, I do interact with some of the PM's and I do wonder whether these PM's have the right skillsets / ability or customer focus or they do understand what they have to deliver the projects etc. Many of projects fail not just because of lack of plans, management support or right resources or tools etc. It is also because of PM who doesnt have the energy to drive the projects or not able to contain the scope of projects and face the customer or who is a "namesake" PM in the Orgn who doesnt have the right skills. So we began an initiative to empower PM with in the companies and we are finding some amount of success now. 

First WHO- get the right people

Then WHAT- Figure out the best path

In the beginning of the project make sure the stakeholders share a common understanding of how they will determine whether this project is successful.

Success can be measured by achieving certain customer satisfaction measures,reaching a specified sales volume,increasing market share by a certain amount by a specified date etc....

Have a criteria to determine whether this project is successful.

• Compare actual effort or time spent on each task to your estimates,
• By recording this you can improve your estimating approach.
• To record this ask each individual by recording his estimates and actuals.

First WHO- get the right people

Then WHAT- Figure out the best path

Beginning

Following these basic principles will give your project a good start:

• Keep it simple!
• Identify the audience.
• Who benefits?
• Get buy-in.
• Deliver the plan.
• Follow the idea through to use.

Requirements

Take a piece of paper and draw a house. Now ask five people to each draw a house and compare it with the one you have drawn. Hey presto, five houses different from yours. We may have town houses, family houses, bungalows, maisonettes, the list goes on. All houses, but different in size, layout, decor and many other ways. The same applies to project requirements. Your view of the customer needs could be different to that of your customer. Ensure you gather a concise, accurate and signed-off set of requirements before you start building.

Communicate

Does everyone understand the project well enough to give an elevator speech? If the answer is no, create a one-page executive summary about the project that gives all the key information. The content of your executive summary might be something like this:

• Give it a name - bring it to life.
• Start and finish date - everyone needs a target.
• Project leader - the right person for the job.
• Objective - make it clear and concise.
• Business potential - buy-in at every level.
• Idea summary - outline of what it is.
• Key issues - what are the stumbling blocks.
• Timeline - hitting the milestones.
• Resources and materials - everyone likes to know up front.
• Budget - what do you need, who signs it off.
• Evaluation - how we measure it, did it deliver?
• Ideas for improvement - sets you up for the next project.

Circulate this summary to all your stakeholders before you start.

Kick-Off

You've now got an agreed set of requirements and communicated the project to everyone that needs to know. It's time to begin. Arrange a project kick-off meeting remembering:

• Everyone needs to be there.
• Get the executive summary to everyone first in plenty of time and follow up.
• The project leader needs to be in control.
• Involve the end-users.
• Ask for feedback to find out the problems.

Ask attendees to explain what the project is, what their involvement is; what they need, by when, find out what the potential problems are and how they are going to tackle them.

Control

Now the project is underway you must deliver the plan; communicate progress and manage resources. This is where you earn your money.

• Regular updates - don't let it slip.
• Stick to the project plan and thoroughly examine it.
• Put people on the spot.
• No matter what happens get it done.
• Test, test, test.
• Keep the end-users involved.

Delivery

You've created something, now people need to use it.

• Make sure it works!
• Choose the right person to champion it.
• Create a fanfare.
• Don't forget the training.
• Follow-up: have pre-arranged meetings in place to make sure everything is working to plan.

Hi All

 Am penning down my views based on my decade old experience in Project management

-Define project success criteria

-Identify project drivers, constraints, and degrees of freedom

-Define product release criteria

-Negotiate achievable commitments

-Write a plan

-Decompose tasks to inch-pebble granularity

-Develop planning worksheets for common large tasks

-Plan to do rework after a quality control activity

-Manage project risks

-Plan time for process improvement

-Respect the learning curve

-Estimate based on effort, not calendar time

-Don't schedule multi-tasking people for more than 80 percent of their time

-Build training time into the schedule

-Record estimates and how you derived them

-Use estimation tools

-Plan contingency buffers

-Record actuals and estimates

-Count tasks as complete only when they're 100 percent complete

-Track project status openly and honestly

-Conduct project retrospectives

Tracking of progress and phase reviews will lead the project to success. It will give clear idea of where the project stands and identify issues.