What are the Best Practices of Project Management?

In IT industry there are many role and position to accomplish various jobs. Project managers also play a vital role in managing the IT services. Some says project managers are people manager, yes it’s correct they handle people however it is a portion of their responsibilities. Being a project manager, Blair F Pollard strongly admits that project management has strong foundation which leads to successful project management. Let us discuss some best practices of a good project management.

Define the Scope and Objectives

Project management is a goal driven methodology. Figure out the real objective of the project, what exactly is supposed to achieve to get a success of the project? Suppose your boss asks you to organize a camp to educate people about child labour to raise the profile of company in local community. Planning and managing is the key objective of project management. How this goal will accomplish?  What is the scope of the project? Will employees take their own vehicles to reach camp destination or company transport will manage it? Project manager decide the activities which are in the scope or out of the scope project.

Define the Deliverables

At the end we all need results, project management is somewhat like this, to achieve the desired result what things you delivered at the project completion. If your project is an advertising for a new brand of car then one of deliverables might be the graphics for a newspaper advert. Once you have decided the deliverables, next is to get it reviewed by stakeholders.

Project Planning

Here comes the phase where project manager decide the resources, people and budget are required to complete the project. Which phases will be involved in completion of the project and which products will be delivered in each phase? Deliverables are already in place and estimate time and effort required to complete each activities need to be set. Create a project plan which will captured realistic schedule to complete the project.

Communication

Communication is the key for a successful project plan. Your project plan will not be successful if it is not well communicated to your team. A good project manager always share his/her plan with the team so that everybody in the team should know about their responsibilities, the project work stream, their duties and what they are accountable for?

Risk Management

There is always a risk of staff lacking the technical skills, hardware shortage etc. etc. The main issue is to discover the main risks to a project and work on them as soon as possible to avoid the risk. If you can’t evade the risk completely at least alleviate the risk in order to lessen the effect.

According to Blair F Pollard, project management is an art of people management, process management and performance management.