Project management has evolved from a set of recommendable processes to a methodology taken as mandatory for the survival of the company. Today, every business, including routine activities, can be understood as a series of projects. In today’s article we will show you the fundamental principles of project management that will most affect your team and its work, so that you have better project management and consequently create a greater return for your company.
In recent years, there has been incredible growth in the need to capture best practices related to managing benefits realisation and value creation. The need to achieve excellence in project management today is evident in almost every business, as better practices lead to greater business value, a higher concentration of benefits and better benefits management.
When there are no rules, methods and procedures in place to manage projects, they cannot access the answer to these questions: What is being done? Who is responsible? Is it within budget? What has failed? What remains to be delivered? All these issues dictate the success or failure of a team, its leader and ultimately a company.
As a consequence, if project management is badly structured, all stages will be confronted with various problems, whether at the level of execution and delivery, team motivation or even loss of information. In other words, it’s chaos to work without organisation!
For a better project management in your company, we will inform you below which are the 7 fundamental principles of Project Management.
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Define the project broadly
In other words, first start by questioning yourself and then answer your main questions. Project managers need to know the objectives first before assigning tasks to, so that there is no waste of resources.
Start by asking yourself:
- Why are we doing this project?
- What benefits will this project bring to our company?
- What will success look like? Can we quantify it?
Answers to these questions will help define the project.
It should be noted that the choice of project will influence the workflow, the use of resources and even the security mechanisms adopted.
At this stage the Manager must be ready to take decisions with agility. You can use Asana to accomplish this agility and allow the team to keep track of the work.
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Carry out an action plan in order to achieve a critical path
When carrying out the action plan, it is important to carry out a critical path. In other words, within a project there are some tasks that are linked to each other by a dependency bond. That is, they can only start after one or the other has been completed. In this way, a critical path is created.
This path will give the project a greater chance of staying on track.
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Identify the stakeholders and decide how best to involve them.
In this fundamental principle of project management, it is present the need for Managers to define who will work on the project and what is the best way to involve each stakeholder, that is, to manage team, so that everyone feels connected to the project.
Through the Asana tool it is known that 60% of people work on work and only 14% work on strategy. In other words, the time dedicated to effective work is unnecessarily reduced, demonstrating once again the need to know how to manage a team.
For the Manager to get a sense of how the work is being done by each party, they can use Asana where it allows the Manager to have an idea of the status of the work being done by his project team, who is responsible for what and when.
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Communicate the action plan to the team maintaining fluid communication
The larger the corporation, the greater the challenge to carry out knowledge transfer. Without a structured approach to this same transfer, companies can repeat mistakes and miss valuable opportunities due to poorly filtered information.
For good communication they can use communication sessions, staff handovers or even webinars.
It is important that when communicating the plan the Project Manager uses the following practices:
- Listen carefully before speaking and do not jump to conclusions.
- Listen carefully before you speak and don’t jump to conclusions.Make sure you have understood what others are saying and try to understand the issue from their point of view.
- If the situation is not being managed in the most efficient way, do not be afraid to ask for advice and assistance.
At this stage you need to be careful not to overwhelm participants with unnecessary communication, and you can turn to Asana, which allows you to create, store and share files and documents with your team. (Examples: Dropbox, Google Drive, Box). It can also be used as a messaging and communication tool. In other words, to connect and communicate with teams. (Examples: Gmail, Slack). Thus, it is not necessary to constantly resort to videoconferencing, ending up losing effective working time. In 2020, skilled workers spent an average of 157 hours on videocalls and unnecessary meetings.
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Watch the road ahead for likely obstacles
Once the project has started, the manager should be on the lookout for obstacles that could delay the project. For this you need to have a macro vision at all times, so that you can identify obstacles or threats.
You should be aware that obstacles may appear that prevent for example, the possibility to meet deadlines which consequently lead to higher budgets. In order to meet deadlines you can always opt to use Asana(74% of customers say Asana helps their team meet deadlines), it is also known from Asana that workers fail to meet more than 25% of the stipulated deadlines.
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Use key indicators to measure the effectiveness of the project
Measuring project effectiveness is one of the 7 fundamental principles of Project Management. In fact, there are many key performance indicators that can be used to measure effectiveness. The indicators used will depend on which objective and type of project.
You should always start by asking yourself “Has the project addressed the problem you were trying to solve? De seguida, deve examinar outros indicadores-chave como por exemplo os KPI´s (métrica que mede o quão bem uma organização realiza uma atividade operacional, tática ou estratégica crucial para o sucesso atual e futuro da organização.)
The need for these KPIs is simple. Everything that is measured, is realised! If the aim of a performance measurement system is to improve effectiveness and efficiency, then KPIs have to reflect controllable factors.
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Close the project and hold a debriefing with the participants.
There is no right or wrong way to close a project. However, it is always a good idea to get the project participants together and hold a debriefing. In other words, come up with answers such as:
- Do we stick to the budget? Or have we slipped? If we slipped, where it happened?
- What went well? What didn’t go so well?
- Who have underperformed?
So that it is possible to identify where the failures occurred and understand the reasons.
But don’t forget that a bad idea executed perfectly is still a bad idea.
Do you want to implement project management in your company? Looking to start using Asana or even improve the way you use it? Contact Task And Flow…