Project management strategies play crucial role to achieve acceptable project outcomes. So, those are help project managers to gain various decisions and make the necessary changes to the project, boost the planning phase efficiency, and set up project team members toward a common goal. Therefore, as a project manager, you should have good sense when selecting the right project management strategies for your project’s success.
Table of Contents
What Are Project Management Strategies?
A strategy means a plan of action created to achieve the long-term or short-term goals of the organization. As such, Project management strategies help to achieve acceptable outcomes for the project. Therefore, project managers can use various strategies to improve the efficiency of the project.
Read More: 8 steps you should know in the strategic planning process
Why Use Project Management Strategies?
Project management strategies help project managers to maintain triple constraints of the project. It includes costs, time, and scope.
Project management strategies help project managers to identify unknown challenges or issues. Those things may negatively impact project scope, time, or costs. That will create many problems when achieving the project outcomes.
On the other hand, project management strategies provide a framework for better teamwork. It will help higher production and more efficient projects. Efficient projects can achieve acceptable outcomes with the overall profitability of the project. Accordingly, project management strategies are crucial for the project’s success.
15 Project Management Strategies
Define SMART Goals and Keep Them Achievable
As a project manager, you should better understand the initiation phase of your project. After understanding the initiation phase, you should define project goals in the planning phase of your project.
Accordingly, before starting the project, project managers should define project goals. It will help to achieve acceptable project outcomes. Therefore, when defining project goals, you should use SMART methods to evaluate the project goals.
Specific – There is no ambiguity in the objectives for the project team to misunderstand
Measurable – Project metrics help team members understand whether their project objectives are met or not. Project metrics include Gross profit margin, cost variance, return on investment, etc.
Related: https://cloudkeypm.com/why-is-important-project-metrics-in-managing-a-project/
Attainable – The project objective should be realistic
Relevant – The project goals should fit the organization’s strategic plan and support the project charter.
Time-bound – The project goals have a deadline date for achieving them
Goals are crucial to the project’s success. Therefore, project managers need to be well-defined their project goals. It will help them keep their project on track
Create a Project Plan
Planning is an essential element for any project. While planning a project, project managers and other team members will determine the processes. However, the planning phase may differ from project to project, but generally the following things include a project plan. Those are schedule, budget, and risk management.
Planning helps project managers map out the overall picture of the project. And helps understand the project work needed to achieve project goals and gives time to identify and prepare for risks that could impact the project.
Manage Project Tasks
A project task is an activity that needs to be accomplished project goals within a set period of time. And every project task should be assigned to one or more individuals for completion. Most projects have many tasks that lead to milestones. As such, project tasks help you clearly define project milestones.
Therefore, the work of a project is broken down into many different project tasks. You can do this in two ways. Those are, Top-down scheduling and Bottom-up scheduling.
As a leader, you can use the Kanban board to manage tasks and workflows. Kanban boards are a visual tool. It can be created on whiteboards, poster boards, and more. The Kanban board helps give a quick visual understanding of work details and provides critical task information. Also, it help with capturing metrics and improving workflows. On the other hand, you can use project management software like Asana or Trello to manage project tasks efficiently.
Set Milestones to Track Project Progress
A project milestone is a crucial point within the project schedule that usually indicates the completion of essential deliverables. As such, milestones are significant checkpoints in your project and help keep them on track. Therefore, milestones help ensure your project is on schedule to meet its goals.
Milestones help give a clear picture of the amount of work required. Also help project managers to identify project progress, stay on track, motivate team teammates, and show progress to the project stakeholders. Furthermore, milestones help project managers uncover areas where they might need to adjust project scope, schedule, or resources to meet acceptable project outcomes.
Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) is a tool that sorts the tasks and milestones of the project in a hierarchy. Accordingly, project team members should be completed project tasks and milestones. That is a helpful tool because it helps break down the various challenges of the project into more manageable chunks.
Define Project Scope
The project scope should be defined during the initial planning stage. And it establishes all essential details of the project. It should include the project budget, timeline, and resources to ensure that all the work falls within the scope and supports the project outcomes.
After understanding the project scope, project managers should document all the details because everyone can review them when necessary. Furthermore, the project scope includes the boundaries of the project. Therefore it should be clearly defined. Poorly defined project scope can negatively impact your budget, timeline, or project outcomes.
Document Project Processes
Documentation is a crucial part of your project. It provides written guidance on how the project progressed. As such, you can avoid misinterpretation or miscommunication. Written communication like memos, emails, internal chat tools, and other working documents like tasks report, and status reports.
Project team members and senior stakeholders can reference the project plan and associated documents when they need a refresher on schedule or milestones. Important💡 Document all the project plans in one place, then the new project manager or member can quickly find and understand everything. On the other hand, it will help future projects to understand the team’s abilities.
Encourage Teamwork
Teamwork is crucial to achieving acceptable project outcomes. As a leader, you should encourage team members to adapt to project progress. As well as you can set up project team members toward a common goal.
Read More: 6 importance of team building in project management
Set Clear Expectation
As a leader, you should communicate with primary and secondary stakeholders to provide essential information. Accordingly, you should send clear expectation reminders and accept feedback. That is crucial to the project’s success. Clear expectations help minimize misinterpretations because they unite everyone under the same guidelines.
Use Project Management Tools to Improve Project Progress
As a leader, you can use project management tools to track project progress. And also help manage the project team and resources.
Project management tools help track project task deadlines, provide visibility to others, manage project budgets, create helpful diagrams and manage contracts, etc. Types of project management tools include scheduling and work management software, productivity tools, and collaboration tools.
- Productivity and collaboration tools include online shared documents, meeting agendas, status updates, spreadsheets, emails and chats, project plans, and presentations.
- Work management software includes Asana, JIRA, Trello, ClickUp, etc.
However, before introducing a new tool to the project team, you should be ensured that this change is actually going to benefit the project.
Related : https://cloudkeypm.com/top-5-tips-for-successfully-introducing-new-tools-to-the-project-team/
Allow for Feedback
As a leader, getting feedback from team members and stakeholders is crucial because it helps identify key project factors to improve or control.
Identify and Manage Project Risks
Identifying and managing project risk is crucial for the project’s success. As a leader, you can use tools and techniques to identify project risks, including brainstorming and risk assessment.
Brainstorming is one of the most effective techniques for identifying project risks because it allows the group to share ideas without judgment. During brainstorming, you can use tools like a fishbone diagram.
Using these tools and techniques, you can identify and manage each risk that will be determined based on your organization’s risk appetite. Also, it helps to determine the willingness of the organization to accept the possible outcomes of a risk.
Selecting the Right Team Members for the Project
As a project manager, you should decide who you need on your project. Therefore, the following factors you should consider when selecting project team members.
- Required roles
- Team size
- Necessary skills
- Availability
- Motivation
Conduct Project Meetings
Project meetings play a crucial role throughout the project life cycle. Meetings help you better identify the project goals and structure and enhance the efficiency of the project activities.
The following are examples of project management meetings.
Project kick-off meetings – This meeting marks the beginning of the project. It means aligning the team, management, and stakeholders to understand the project goals with actual plans and procedures.
Status updates – This is the most common meeting of the project management. Status update meeting is a recurring meeting to discuss project progress, challenges, and upcoming steps.
Stakeholder meeting – Stakeholder engagement is essential for successful project management. This meetings help draw the expertise of stakeholders and share critical project updates.
Retrospective meeting – This meeting includes receiving lessons learned about what is going well, what you keep doing, and what can be improved. As such, this meeting allows for celebrating project success and discussing essential areas to improve the project.
Define Project Roles and Responsibilities
When managing a project to meet the project goals, there should have the right team to achieve them. Each person has a set role and responsibilities to help bring the project to a landing. Project roles include project manager, project team members, sponsors, and customers.
You can use tools like stakeholder mapping analysis and RACI charts as a leader. These tools help clarify roles and responsibilities and prevent confusion on who takes ownership of which tasks.
Conduct Post-Project Review
By conducting a post-project review helps evaluate project outcomes and improve project processes. As a leader, you can gain feedback from project stakeholders about the project’s progress and outcomes. As such, this will help you to achieve acceptable project outcomes. Thus, this strategy is a crucial part of project management.
Conclusion
Project management strategies play a fantastic role throughout the project life cycle, including initiating, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling, and closing phases. As a leader, when achieving acceptable project outcomes, project management strategies will help you as a crucial. Also, with these strategies you can use project management tools and techniques, software, and methodologies to enhance project efficiency.
