As a Project Manager, you must have tried every bit to make your project successful and while preparing your resume you must have highlighted your success. Now the question is that have you always been successful while managing the projects?
If you say yes, then you need to think again. Is it really that you have been successful in all your endeavors as a project manager or there have been certain times that made you learn the better way?
There must have been times when you failed to achieve what you should and was unable to fetch a good return on the investment. There may have been small incidences that have affected your projects and these are the stepping stone for success. Yes, every project manager will agree that they have learned a lot from project failures.
Thus, to learn how to be successful in managing projects you need to learn from your failures. Here are certain lessons that will help you manage a successful project.
Adhere to the project schedule
For making your projects successful, the first and most important thing that you must adhere to is the project schedule. It is the responsibility of the project manager to create a milestone chart along with Gantt Chart that will help all the stakeholders to track the progress of the project along with time.
If the project manager is not tracking the progress of the project with the timeline set, then he may miss out any early warnings for completion of the project. Whether the project is of launching a new product or developing a new application, every project must be completed after a stipulated time.
Hence, it is necessary to schedule a timeline for completing each step of the project for a successful project management. While the project is progressing, if you miss out or lag behind time in any of the steps then you can find out the reasons fast and try to recover the lagging in the next step. This way the overall project will be able to meet the deadline, else due to delay in the completion of project there maybe financial loss too.
Thus, for being successful in managing projects make sure there is a practical schedule and you and your team is adhering to it.
The project triangle must always be considered
It does not matter whether you are a top class executive or the project manager, you cannot avoid the project triangle. The three constraints in a project are cost, time and scope and if one side of this triangle is affected others will also be affected. Actually just the way you cannot change one side of any triangle without affecting the other sides same way if there are any changes in any of the constraint there will surely be change in other constraints too.
Suppose you are working on launching a new product. You must have deduced the steps that will help you complete the project successfully. The scope must have been discussed earlier, but after completing the framework of the project you can finally complete the first side and that is scope of the project. After doing that you must have scheduled the project and have made timeline. Thus, you have drawn one side of the triangle, time. Next based on all this, the cost will be budgeted and the third side is also made.
While you are progressing towards completing the product launch, you suddenly have to manage many Change Requests. Each Change Request needs to be analyzed, estimated, and accepted or rejected through a CCB : Change Control Board which regroups the project manager, the technical leaders, architects, and work packages managers. The estimation of the change request indicates the scope’s impact, needed time to implement it, and the corresponding additional cost.
Project heroics only lead to project failure
Heroic deeds are for movies only; if you try them in your project the result may not be similar to what you see on the movies. If someone thinks that he can do magic while completing the project, try to avoid such people during the project. he will lead to confusion that will delay the project delivery or the project completion.
Any project can be completed successfully only when the members of the project work as a team. You can expect to have better results with a better coherent team.
Thus, try to make a project team more co-operative and having trust on each other.
Conclusion
These are just some ideas that will help you in successfully managing projects.
The key to successfully complete a project is to from your previous project management failures.