Some areas, like accounting, proceed in daily, weekly, monthly,
quarterly, and annual cycles of work. But disciplines like IT are highly
project oriented. IT’s reputation lives and dies with its projects, which makes
it essential to bulletproof your projects with strong checkpoints and practices
that ensure their success. Here are 10 strategies that can help.
1: Manage by walking around
There’s only so much you’ll learn about a project’s true health
by reviewing project reports and memos. If you are the project manager, make it
a point to spend time out in the trenches, visiting with staff. You’ll pick up a
lot about how a project is really going by reading faces and body language.
Visiting with people in person at their workstations also keeps communications
channels open.
2: Break projects into phases with checkpoints
It’s much easier to manage a project — especially a complex
one — if you break it into phases that can be incrementally tested and deployed.
The project team gets to see some early results, as do end users. In addition,
a multi-phase project with periodic checkpoints assures you of review time to
confirm that the project remains on course and is on its way to delivering the
value it’s supposed to.
3: Use prototyping as an early-stage project technique
By engaging end users into early project prototypes so they can
kick the tires on the project, you save yourself grief in later project stages.
That early involvement reduces the risk of users being unpleasantly surprised
because the project didn’t turn out as they expected. Prototyping also
encourages continuous collaboration between end users and project developers.
4: Identify your critical people as well as the project’s critical path
Key project contributors may get sick or take maternity/paternity
leave or leave for another job altogether, so it’s important to identify early
in the project who you can ill afford to lose — and to have backup provisions
in place just in case. Most project managers identify the critical path of project
tasks that must absolutely be completed, but they fail to do the same thing
with their staff.
5: Secure project backing
No matter how sound your project is, if upper and middle
management — and your immediate user-beneficiaries
— aren’t sold on the project, it is likely to fail. Always secure project
commitment before starting any work.
6: Use collaborative project management software
There are still companies that manage projects with
spreadsheets. Some even use monolithic project management software that resides
on a single workstation that a project administrator painstaking updates on a
daily basis. But projects are never sequential in their communications or their
workflows, so the software tracking projects shouldn’t be, either. Today,
projects can to be run in a collaborative environment with a project management
solution that runs in the cloud. Each project staff member can update his/her
task status in real time, giving visibility of current project work to others
who are on the project team.
7: Develop a comprehensive QA and test plan… and don’t go live until you’re
ready
Project managers get nervous when deadline begins to
approach. Consequently, quality assurance and thorough check-out of projects may
get skipped or cut short. This is a mistake. The last thing you want is a
public relations nightmare on the first day a project goes live because end
users and customers are calling in with their frustrations. If you’re the
project manager, a scene like this makes it likely that you’ll be called in to someone’s office as well — something you
definitely want to avoid!
8: Document
It’s a temptation to skimp on documentation when you’re
working a project and deadlines get tight. Resist temptation. If you include
and QA the documentation of project modules, callable routines, etc., you make
the project handoff easier for your project maintenance team. More than 60% of
the average IT department’s time is spent on systems maintenance today. Poorly
documented projects are one reason why.
9: Conduct a post-project assessment
Even successful projects come with their share of road bumps
along the way. Once the project completes, get the project team together to go
over what went well and not so well. Then, take what you learn and apply it to
the next project. Your project execution will improve.
10: Celebrate!
Project work is hard and relentless. Once a major phase of a
project completes — or the entire project completes — take time to celebrate
the victory with your staff at lunch or dinner or with an office celebration.
People need to celebrate their successes so they can be ready for the next
project they’re going to succeed at.
Also read…
- IT project management terms you should know
- 14 quality checks for your IT project schedule
- How to make project management a learned skill and behavior
- Project management: One size does not fit all
- Project Management Resource Kit (Requires a Tech Pro Research membership)
