Manage Your Projects with Methods & Principles

Manage Your Projects with Methods & Principles :- Whether you are a manager, expert in a field or other, you most likely have to take charge of the management of certain projects. Significant challenges in your own attributions. A question arises: what methodology to use to achieve the goals? I will not talk to you about the Prince, Scrum, XP method, but will enunciate a simple approach, applicable to any type of project, as well for recruitment as for the organization of a service.

Initialize: What, Why, How and Who

This is the first phase. You know the purpose. You need to know more and…

Recall the purpose of the project

Its purpose, perhaps specify the context.

Define Precisely what the Project should Accomplish

This is the beginning of your specifications. You must plan to describe what you want to achieve. And write it down.

Fix the cost and time constraints

The means at your disposal are not infinite (in which case, we would not read this article …). And the delays are certainly not either! At this stage, the rules of the game must be set. Mark the scope of your project.

Identify Resource Persons

The ultimate stage of this stage is to set up a project team. Depending on the scope of your mission, it is not necessarily necessary. On the other hand, it would be surprising if you could run your project without using other skills, internal or external. Resources that is useful in terms of advice or execution.

Plan the Steps and Actions: Who does What, When

You now know where you want to go. You know your budget and time constraints and you have listed the people you will need to mobilize.

It is now time to set all this data to music!

Distinguish the different stages and define the outputs

The idea is not only to have a beginning and … an end on your planning tool.

To make the work easy, identify the main stages with intermediate productions (the famous outputs). Example for recruitment: definition of the profile of the candidate (output: list of knowledge, know-how and skills of the ideal candidate), launch of the search for candidates (output: list of candidates), etc. Once this work is done, place these big actions on a schedule and assign deadlines. A graphical representation greatly facilitates tracking.

Add the Main tasks

For each step, put in your planning the consequent tasks to realize. Do not define everything in detail. Stay at an operational level that will help you achieve your goals.

For each, associate resource persons to mobilize. This is an opportunity to inquire about their availability. Indeed, it is strongly recommended not to wait until your project is planned to check the availability of a person. Knowing that, in any case, you are likely to experience hazards in your planning … We are in real life! In this regard, do not forget that it is a tool for preparation, monitoring and even reorganization.

This gives you a planning of the tasks to be performed and associated resources.

Run and Fly

With your initial preparation, you can start scheduled operations. Each step must end on the defined output. If unforeseen events occur, manage them with the following steps in mind. The goal is to stay as close as possible to the initial plan.

As you progress, coordinate the work of resource persons, facilitate meetings, etc.

Put in place the organizational adjustments (it is very rare that there is nothing at this level): training, change management.

Depending on the case (and the sensitivities), these adjustments are made during the execution or during the delivery. To maintain control, we prefer to manage this step in the project most of the time.

Finalize

Here you are at the end of your mission. To close it successfully:

• Make sure the initial goals have been achieved
• Deliver, if a final solution must be delivered. This is the case for a computer application …
• Finish “cleanly” the work in progress: written reports, documentation completed, resource persons informed of the end of the project, etc.
• Take stock of what has worked and the difficulties encountered. A very useful exercise to improve constantly!