Project Management, like accounting or bridge engineering, is governed by specific rules. This means that it is worth setting up rules for each company that will apply to project management. Compliance with them will guarantee us the effective implementation of projects in the company, regardless of their nature or size. zoetalentsolutions.com will let you know more about Project Management.
How to effectively manage projects in the company?
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Design and implement pragmatic project management standards in your company.
There are two main project management methodologies in the world, they are Prince 2 and PMI. The full use of these methodologies allows you to build a large ocean ship or jet engine. However, the vast majority of companies do not implement such comprehensive and technologically advanced projects.
Companies mostly carry dozens of smaller projects that last from several weeks to several to several months, rarely longer. Both Prince2 and PMI recommend that these methodologies be “tailored” to the types and complexity of projects that a given company implements – so as not to overly bureaucratic, or “overcomplicate” project management.
Excessive bureaucracy and complexity demotivate project teams, and this significantly affects the failure of a number of projects. In many companies, there is something called a “project management handbook”. It contains a set of rules, document templates that apply in a given company, thanks to it everyone knows how to approach the project in order to succeed.
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Each project must have an “active” sponsor from senior management.
The project sponsor is one of the most important people determining the success of the project. However, the sponsor cannot be something like a “statistician”, ie it is because the company rules say so because he is not actively involved in the project. However, such a sponsor does not give much.
A good sponsor does not have to and should not be operatively involved in the project. But he should engage in the sense that he understands what is going on in the project, whether the project is going right or wrong, has good contact with the project manager and actively makes the required decisions.
The sponsor unclogs obstacles standing up in front of the project and allows it to move forward. The world literature clearly says that one of the main factors of project failure is the lack of commitment to senior management projects.
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Ensure that the project manager and his team have the capacity to complete the project.
The design team should not be a collection of random people. Individuals belonging to the project team should present a set of competencies that will allow them to implement the project well. If we involve an inexperienced project manager for an important project and give him in the management of people with inadequate competences, it is as if we immediately burned chicken in the oven – such a project will not succeed.
The company’s management, project sponsor, should be 100% convinced that people who are delegated to implement a specific project have a 100% chance of successful implementation. If there is no such belief, it can be compared to roulette. It agrees that the result will not be black or red, i.e. as clear as in roulette, but we can be sure that if this approach occurs often in the company, it means that many projects – as well as many roulette bets – will fail.
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Choose projects for implementation wisely and objectively.
The undeniable fact is that the implementation of each project involves resources, and these resources cost. The second undeniable fact is that each company can carry out a limited number of projects at a given moment. And finally, an equally undeniable fact is that companies have many ideas for projects.
All this means that every company should be very careful about the selection of projects that it wants to implement. For example, what one of the international logistics companies operating in Poland has stated:
“(…) we have over fifty ideas for potential projects, and at the same time we have the internal capacity to implement about five large projects – we need a tool that will allow us to objectively choose those ideas that have the greatest impact on building our company’s lasting value.”
This company decided to build a scoring model. Such a model contains a number of questions on the basis of which each project is evaluated and within each question, each project is allocated the appropriate number of points. Ideas are compared among themselves and those that fall out best become projects. Such a selection process has the advantage that it is largely objective and minimizes the impact of strong people “pushing” their solutions.
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Always develop a good Business Case for the project.
If the project does not result from any legislative conditions, its implementation should always focus on achieving specific business goals. This means that before starting a project, its business goals should be precisely defined and recorded. Why? Because it is not enough to specify only the required product and scope of the project. You need to know what this product is supposed to bring to the organization.
This approach affects the greater creativity of project teams who know what they are doing and what business effects are to be achieved for the organization. Another thing is the responsibility of the project sponsor – the sponsor should always focus on what business effects on the project will achieve. The project manager should focus on providing the project product. Inappropriate proportions, both should be interested in both.