Claudia Eggers October 23, 2020 Project Management
Among all the tools at our disposal for managing projects, checklists are perhaps the simplest and most productive means of building consistency in work practices. Checklists are useful in almost every field of human endeavor, and in particular where repeatability and systematic action drive performance. Yet they are still much under-used in the planning and managing of projects.
They are a fundamental tool in a project manager`s toolkit. However, an unseasoned project manager can find that they can take over the project and result in reduced control. How so? In this article we will look at their potential pitfalls and provide some tips and strategies for ensuring successful project management. Gantt charts are, after all, just one of many ways of presenting the project planning and actual data that has been input.
If you are a manager responsible for managing projects, you will eventually need to delegate tasks to individuals or teams. And so it is important that the tool yo are using to manage the project be able to keep track of who is performing what task, and also allow you to add new documents and notes with ease. Communication is important with any project. You should have the capability to have good communication with your team through email reminders and keep track of how the project is going at any moment. And a good project management tool will allow you to have online discussions with your project team no matter their location. A reliable tool for managing a project is essential and will serve you well.
A methodology guides an organization or an individual from start to finish. A project management methodology probes deep in the various steps of the project management life cycle. It is a checklist of tasks to be performed in the various steps of the plan. The project management methodology gives the manager a definite control over the scheme, allowing him or her to maneuver the team toward the destination called success. A project without a methodology would be a train running without tracks. It further allows the project manager to standardize the protocols of a plan, thereby providing a general structure of the steps, which can be followed in all other future projects.
Most larger organisations have well developed and run IT departments. They usually have formal project offices with established plan templates and standards, with project office staff and automated plan analysis systems (for example seeking orphan tasks / missing dependencies and so on to measure overall `plan quality`). Smaller organisations - for example, `IT solutions houses` - may lack this level of sophistication but will certainly use detailed project plans.
The next phase is the execution phase. Here the project must be monitored and managed. A schedule is derived which includes work breakdown, followed by allocation of tasks to people, allocation of resources and finally setting up deadlines for tasks. It is very important to have both a short-term goal and a long-term goal. While the long term goal is to get the product done, the short goals must be imposed by the project manager, who helps in guiding and motivating the members of the team working on the plan. Two important documents namely the issue log and the risk log which are both maintained by the project manager. The issue log keeps track of issues raised by the stakeholders and the risk log considers the vulnerabilities of a system.
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