Project Management Steps

Documented a checklist of common mistakes that may happen while managing a project. This is really a reference while managing the project.

Project management is most commonly managing the challenges around the triple constraints like scope, cost, and schedule while managing the priorities. Though there are additional constraints like subcontractors, quality, and resources, they are well under the major constraints themselves.

This post is not specific to waterfall or agile projects. As in Agile, there’s no point in spending months making a really big complicated plan at the start of your project because it’s probably not going to happen considering the limitations and uncertainties. 

So it would make more sense to have a very flexible, approximate plan and vary as you go in every iteration.  Mostly you plan and do, plan and do, plan and do cycle.

The key steps in Project Management:

Step 1: Define the project scope at a higher level in terms of scope, cost estimate, and schedule. Capture the assumptions, Exclusions in the process and to get the buy-in from the stakeholders and customers. Get the Project Charter ready.

Step 2: Next is to get a list of all the tasks. However, you can decide how many levels of granularity you wanted your plan to break down. Define the skeleton of the project schedule with WBS, Tasks, Milestones, and Deliverables.

Step 3: Then step three is to estimate those tasks, and there are two things to estimate time and money. 

Step 4: When we say Time estimation – It involves two types, how many hours of work is involved and how many weeks or days (duration) till it’s finished. It is very important to note that these two are different things. How many hours of works tells about the cost whereas the three weeks of elapsed time talks about the duration.

Step 5: Next step is to identify the dependencies between the tasks. This is usually called a network diagram. This step is very important as it captures the interconnections, the dependencies between the tasks, which will help us identify the risks in a later stage. We apply the fast-tracking techniques here.

Step 6: Next step is to create a Gantt chart – since you have a time scale on your diagram and so, you show each task as a bar, and then you can see the whole project drawn out as a series of bars, so that’s the Gantt chart. 

Step 7: Step seven is all about resource allocation to the tasks because if you’ve got several bars all happening at the same time you can look vertically and you can ask yourself, do we have enough resources to do everything that we want to do on this project? It also helps in planning the resources working in multiple projects.

Step 8: Then the final step of the planning is step eight, which is risk identification, prioritization, mitigation plan.

Step 9: As you carry out your plan you monitor your progress. It’s where you capture the % of complete, capture the KPI’s around the over cost and behind schedule, apply the earned value management, and apply the RAG’s.

Step 10: is where we adjust our plan if necessary, so if we are running behind or we’re over-spending at step 9 and think what are we going to do about that? 

Step 11: During the course of the projects, many factors can pitch in for the project to go off track. Customers can ask for more, resources can leave, quality issues, third-party delays, etc. This step helps you to know if you can accommodate new requests and if yes, what is the additional cost and time.  

Step 12: And then finally step 12 is to review the project at the end. What have we learned? So this step is important to capture the lesson’s learned and store all your reviews in a folder (Archiving).

Step 13: Though all the steps seemed to be strategically correct and logically adapt, there are times, mistakes happen and things go out of control. Let’s see the common project management mistakes in the following post.

Top 10 Mistakes in Project Management:

1. Having your plan in your head
2. Saying Maybe or “I’ll try” or Answering the question “What’s the best you can do if it all goes really well”
3. Not involving team enough in planning/ listing / network /
   risk / rescheduling
4. List of tasks (with dates) rather than a Gantt chart. No itdentification of critical tasks/activity.
5. Not planning for resources of other (all) projects effectively and efficiently.
6. Calculate people, money and hours needed for each task per month/week.
7. Stories rather than a coloured-in Gantt chart & status report.
8. No proper project and process governance set up in the project.
9. Thinking underspend is OK. Need to analyse the gaps.
10. Rescheduling / Repriotizing too late

Bonus Mistakes:

1. Not reviewing periodically / No or incorrect proper status update
2. Not correctly assessing the risks
3. Not propoerly including the holidays and vacation in the plan.
4. No proper tool is used. Many manual work is being done.
5. No proper communication channels set up.
6. No proper config which is yielding to rework.

Hope you found the post informative. Your valuable feedback, question, or comments about this post are always welcome by leaving me message on  contact form is truly appreciated.