It's that time of year again, when new resolutions are made!
The concept is good in itself; it promotes renewal and improvement in many areas...
Let's take a look at the resolutions you should make in the management of your projects!
Here is a great challenge!
However, project management is frequently overlooked within organizations, which take shortcuts or skip steps in project management.
The project isn't initiated properly or too little, all of the tasks aren't clearly defined, and the kick-off meeting isn't scheduled...
What are the consequences? The project's success is put to the test!
Here are our 5 resolutions for successfully completing your projects!
1st resolution: initiate your project (define objectives)
The initiation allows for the project's outlines to be defined. The first elements gathered allow you to:
structure the project,
recall the context, the issues and the goals,
determine the human and technical resources required,
define a budget and deadlines.
2nd resolution: break down the project (define the tasks)
Breaking down the work to be done into deliverables and subtasks helps organize your project into a clear, quantifiable flowchart.
But how do you break down a project?
The WBS method is a project management technique that divides a parent project into child tasks, which are further divided into subtasks.
The goal is to :
structure the project,
identify its overall architecture,
visualize all of the expected deliverables and tasks to be performed.
The WBS is very visual, and it shows all of the work that needs to be done, as well as the priorities and emergencies.
3rd resolution: include durations and deadlines
Only after you've made a thorough list of all the stages of the project will you set aside the time needed to complete them.
One of the most crucial aspects of project planning is time management. Not everything has to be done at the same time.
You must define the important milestones that mark the progress of the project and the deadlines to ensure that the project's delivery time will be respected and identify the deviations that can jeopardize the respect of the deadline.
To do so, strike a balance between the time it takes your team to complete tasks and staying on track with your overall schedule.
Once you know how long each task should take, you can plan and sequence them all properly to build a project roadmap.
4th resolution: allocate resources (define stakeholders)
The allocation, assignment, and overall management of resources are all essential aspects of project management.
The first step in the allocation process is to determine the resources required to complete your project: what, who, how much/over what time frame, and when.
Once this is done, you must select the specific resources that will be assigned to your project activities in order to find practical solutions to these needs. This necessitates a thorough knowledge of the characteristics and availability of your various resources
It is a competitive imperative for your company to maximize your resource utilization rate. The challenge then becomes ensuring that the appropriate resources, with the appropriate skills, are available at the appropriate time to complete the project's tasks.
5th resolution: plan the project
Now all that's left to do is plan the project.
The planning stage determines whether the project will succeed or fail.
The goal of planning is to keep track of how the project's stages progress over time. A crucial step in keeping track of deadlines.
The GANTT chart facilitates task organization, planning, and monitoring. It allows you to control the sequence of tasks, especially when multiple activities are being completed at the same time, to know the deadline for each key step, to set milestones to validate the stages, to allocate and manage resources (human, budgetary, material...), to visualize the tasks to be completed, to track the progress of the project and manage it in relation to the planned deadlines, and to visualize the tasks to be completed.
Once the schedule has been established and validated, the project manager must present himself as the schedule’s guarantor.
When it's time to start a new project, go over our checklist to make sure you don't forget any detail that could go a long way towards making the project a success.
You've realized by now that project management is a difficult task. This is especially true if you haven't yet implemented project management software.
What if you could fulfill your first resolution at the start of the year by purchasing our pragmatic, intuitive, educational, connected, and affordable PPM solution?
Try our SuitePro-G solution for free for 30 days and take advantage of our 5 project management resolutions; it’s right here!
For more than ten years, IQar has been a Pure Project Player and an expert in governance and project portfolio management. It is the publisher of the PPM solution SuitePro-G, which has been voted the best value for money on the PPM market.