10 Steps for Managing Successful Projects
In this guide, we offer 10 steps for successfully managing your projects.
If you have any questions or would like to hear more about project management, please email us or send a message using the contact form.
- Define project organisation structure
- Set clear goals and objectives for the project
- Create a communication plan
- Define roles and responsibilities
- Know the customer’s timeline
- Create a project plan
- Communicate with all participants
- Conduct regular risk assessments
- Document everything as the project progresses
- Develop best practices by reviewing completed projects
1. Define project organisation structure
It is important to understand the structure of a project, this includes the work involved but also the people in different departments, teams, and companies who are all following processes specific to their role. Documenting the project organisation structure early on helps maintain clear communication channels and reduces ambiguity.
2. Set clear goals and objectives for the project
Goals must be agreed with the customer because they will form the basis of the scope of service and fee proposal for the project. Objectives must also be agreed because they describe what actions are required to reach each goal. These objectives act as criteria to determine when the goals have been achieved and will likely form the foundation of the working relationship with the customer. This activity must be carried out with the customer to ensure expectations are aligned and it is clear what the completed project looks like.
3. Create a communication plan
Unclear communication in a project often leads to misaligned goals and objectives which then stalls progress and steers the project away from its intended outcomes.
A good communication plan keeps the customer updated regularly, ensures invoices are delivered at agreed times, and makes sure customers are informed about changes so they have plenty of time to adjust.
While it’s important to communicate bad news, it’s equally important to share positive changes to bolster the relationship so make sure the plan explains what type of information will be shared in different scenarios.
Large projects will involve multiple people so communications must be tailored to various groups, including stakeholders, team members, architects, engineers, subcontractors, and vendors.
Not only should the communication plan include who to contact and what types of information to be shared but the plan should also describe how often certain activities should take place. Having regular opportunities to provide updates can be useful for gathering feedback along the way and ensures the project is on the right track as well as being able to adjust goals and deadlines if necessary.
4. Define roles and responsibilities
Building on the organisation structure of the project, identify key roles with required skills and expertise to recognise resource requirements as well as potential gaps in fulfilling the project brief.
Once the roles have been identified, the specific tasks, duties, and obligations for each role can be fleshed out. An optional extra step is to assign performance indicators to each role.
5. Know the customer’s timeline
When managing projects, it is important to understand the overall timeline the customer wants to achieve.
This timeline may or may not be realistic, but it must be known at the start to guide decisions, such as when scheduling multiple activities concurrently.
It is useful to break the timeline down into various milestones so that the overall project does not appear too daunting. Milestones may sound like goals, but the difference is that goals look ahead, and milestones look back on what has been achieved.
6. Create a project plan
Many people will be involved in the project so when assessing the required resources, it is very possible that they may already be involved in a different project. A good resource planning tool will help get the right competence involved in the project, as well as highlight scheduling conflicts.
By having the right competency of resources, it is very likely that work tasks will be performed with high quality. However, it is hard to achieve a successful project without the team consisting of a mix of both skills and personalities that work well together, so be sure to make holistic decisions are made when assessing who will work on the project.
Once the available resources are in place, the job of creating the project plan can begin.
Break the project down into groups of tasks, or activities that can be aligned with industry best practices or standard operating procedures. For example, architects use the RIBA Plan of Work which organises the process of briefing, designing, constructing and operating building projects into eight stages.
By grouping tasks within an activity or category the work will be easier to manage and track against deliverables. Tasks should have a due date and be assigned to individuals so that they are challenged but are not seen as unattainable. When allocating tasks, it is important to think about the whole person, considering their personality as well as their skills, to maintain a high level of motivation.
Once the tasks are identified and resources are allocated you can build in the milestones from the original timeline so that important stages are recognised and communicated to the customer.
Using a good project management platform will help record the project plan as well as provide visual representations of the project in a Gantt style, or list and board layout. The flexibility of such tools ensures different types of project managers can manage the project according to their preferences.
7. Communicate with all participants
It is imperative that once a project plan is created, that it is communicated to all participants. A plan is only good if it is shared with the people that it affects; and those people follow the plan. Use collaboration tools to share the plan or better yet, make use of a software platform to digitally store the plan so that participants are notified when changes are made in real-time.
8. Conduct regular risk assessments
Regularly conducting risk assessments throughout the project is a crucial aspect of maintaining a safe and healthy working environment. It is important to regularly assess risks to create awareness, raise health and safety standards, prevent injuries, and save money on legal fines and damages.
Thinking about problems that might occur is a useful method of equipping team members with what to do in case an issue does occur. If an issue does occur, then a deviation report should be created to document what happened and what will be done to correct the problem.
Once the deviation has been recorded, processes should be assessed to see if improvements can be made and updated with lessons learned from the issue.
9. Document everything as the project progresses
Making a point of documenting key decisions and actions as they occur will save a vast amount of time over the course of a project. The benefit of recording things as they occur is that the information is fresh in the mind and details are easier to come by. The longer the gap is between something happening and it being documented, the fewer details get recorded.
With the ever-increasing demands on being able to retrieve why decisions were made, it makes good sense to actively store details as a project progresses instead of leaving it to the end of a project.
10. Develop best practices by reviewing completed projects
It is always important to review the success (or failure) of a project because it teaches us what went well and what can be improved next time.
By assessing positive outcomes and the challenges of a project, improvements can be made, and best practices can be developed, which in turn will shape standard operating procedures. In addition, successful projects can be used as a template for future fee proposals as well as ensuring the right items are included in the scope of service.