Know your Team: Having the “right people in the room” when you’re scoping out and planning a project, will help you identify key roadblocks and opportunities to optimise the plan. You should select team members based on their skills, experience, attitude, and availability.
Know your Resources: This includes identifying the key resource pool; people, equipment, and materials. It means knowing how much of a resource is available to your project and their associated costs. You should also allocate and manage your resources wisely to avoid resource overallocation and wasting of time or money.
Know your Stakeholders: Communication is the key to successful project management. You should keep everyone informed about the project status, goals, expectations, issues, and feedback. Specifically, you should identify and manage the project stakeholders and use different communication channels and methods depending on their level of importance and impact to the project.
Know your Plan: Clearly define the scope, goals, responsibilities, and milestones of your project. Make sure your plan is measurable and realistic.
Know your Critical Path: Scope creep is when your project requirements change or expand over time without proper approval or adjustment of resources. This can cause delays, conflicts, and cost overruns. To avoid this, you should know which tasks are at most risk of slipping and which of them will have an immediate impact to the schedule, known as the Critical Path.
Know your Strengths and Weaknesses: Project management is a continuous learning process. You should always evaluate your project performance and outcomes and identify what went well and what didn’t. There are choices and behaviours that you want to see repeated in your future projects, and some you don’t.
Know your Tools: Project management software can help you organize your tasks, communicate with your team, share files, monitor risks, and generate reports. There are many software options available, the most popular and cost-effective choice being Microsoft Project.
At Priority Management, we can show you how to effectively plan projects through our tried and tested Project Planning Breakthroughs course. Once you have your plan mapped out, allow us to guide you through the steps to accurately transfer that plan into Microsoft Project, so when the project goes live, you can continue to manage, troubleshoot, and keep the schedule on track.
Click below to learn more about our Project Management Courses