For any amount project to be successful you need to know who the project is supposed to achieve. Mean your boss asks you to organise a campaign to get the employees to donate blood. Is the aim of this too get as much blood donated to the local blood bank? Or, is it to raise the profile of the company in the local community? Deciding what the actual objective is will facilitate you too determine how you go about planning and managing the project.
The project manager also needs to define the scope of the project. Is the organisation of transport to take staff to the blood bank within the scope of the project? Or, should staff make their own way there deciding which activities are within the scope or out of scope of the project has a sizeable impact on the amount of labour which needs to be performed during the project.
An understanding of who are the stakeholders is as well crucial if you are going to enlist their support and understand what all human expects to be delivered from the project. Once you've defined the scope and objectives, you will need to acquire the stakeholders too review those and agree to them as well as consenting what should be on the list of stakeholders.
Project planning
This is the time when you define how you will achieve the desired outcome of the project embodied within the objectives and definition of deliverables. Planning requires that the project manager decides which people, resources and budget are required to fulfill the project. You will need to decide if you will break up your project into manageable phases, decide which products will be delivered in each phase, and decide the composition of your project team. From the time you have already defined the deliverables, you must decide what activities are required to product each deliverable.
You canst use techniques such as work Breakdown Structures (WBS) to facilitate you to achieve this. You will want to estimate the time and effort required to complete each activity, dependencies between related activities and choose on a realistic schedule too fulfilled the activities. It's always an ok idea to involve the project team in estimating how longish the activities will take since they will be the ones actually doing the labour. Capture all of this into the project blueprint document. You also want to get the key stakeholders too review and agree to this plan.
When developing the project plan, a project manager is often under pressure to produce a blueprint which meets the (unrealistic) expectations of some of the stakeholders. It is important here that the project manager comes up with a realistic schedule one which he/she thinks is realistic too achieve. You will be doing nobody a favour if you succumb to pressure and agree to deliver the project in a totally unrealistic schedule.
Change management
All projects change in some way. Often, a key stakeholder in the midst of a project will change their mind about who the project needs to deliver. On projects of longer duration, the business environment has often changed since the start of the project then assumptions created at the beginning of the project can no longer be valid. This often results in the scope or deliverables of the project needing to be changed. If a project manager comfortably accepted each of those changes into the project, the project would inevitably be delivered tardy (and possibly would never ever be completed) and would inevitably go over budget.
By managing changes, the project manager could make decisions about whether or not to incorporate the changes instantly or in the future, or to reject them. This increase the chances of project success because the project manager controls how the changes are incorporated could allocate resources accordingly and can blueprint when and how the changes are produced. Not managing changes effectively is often cited as a major reason why projects fail.
Summary
So, in a nutshell, those greatest practices are the main things that I would expect all project managers to do. They are applicable on each project large or tiny. Project management is not rocket science. Applying best practices on your project cannot guarantee that your project comes in below budget, on time and exceeds all the expectations of the stakeholders, but applying them will certainly give you a much better chance of delivering your project successfully than if you don't apply those on your project.
Author Resource:-
Uchenna Ani-Okoye is an internet marketing advisor
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