When you have so much to do as a business, it’s great to projectise your work.
The definition of a project is a unique and temporary endeavour that has a definite start and end date that creates a product or a service. In other words, your daily operations is not a project!
The project will have constraints such as
- Scope – what will be done (or not)?
- Time – by when must it be done?
- Cost – how much will all of this cost?
- Quality – what is the quality criteria for the product or service that will be delivered?
Project Management makes use of various knowledge, skills and tools to the get the project done. The classic project management has four phases –
- Initiation – defines what the objectives are, who are the main players, what is included in the scope (and what is excluded), what the deliverables, what are the timelines, what are the milestones, costs, and what are the critical success factors. Typically, a Project Charter is developed and signed off which serves as kick starting the project.
- Planning – this involves coming up with the main work packages to meet all the deliverables that were identified. Basically what must be done (what are the activities, who will do it, and by when will it get done). Every project may not go as smoothly as you would like, therefore, it is important for you to identify and mitigate your risks.
- Executing – Now that you have a plan, it’s time that you started delivering against it.
- Monitoring and controlling – knowing how you doing against scope, time, cost, and quality. Are you on track? What are the issues and risks, and how are you going to deal with them.
- Close-out – since a project has a definite end date, it is always good for you to identify what worked well and what didn’t.
So, come on get start with your first project and make sure to celebrate your milestones.