I’ve been seconded to a cross departmental team to manage a project. I’ve never done this before. What advice can you give me to ensure success?
Traditionally regarded as a technical and highly focused area of management, project management skills are now being seen in the wider business world as vital to the requirements of all senior managers’ development. Parallel to this is the growing belief that those qualities that make a good project manager are also those that are most closely aligned to the skills needed to become the all-round professional manager.
It’s great that you have this opportunity as while today’s managers look to project management experience as an efficient means of managing their time and resources while progressing in their career development, there has been an equal realisation that employers need to effectively recognise, develop and put those skills to work. Forward thinking organisations recruiting senior managers are looking for evidence of successful project management as a clear sign of added value.
In addition to the obvious technical competencies, the main skills any project manager worth his salt must demonstrate would surely include excellent time management, people skills, organisational flair, technical know-how and the ability to think outside established boundaries. Good project managers have a clear perspective of the big picture, are fully committed to the mission, understand the importance of external stakeholders, delegate effectively and also be able to put together and empower the best people for the job.
There’s a number of things you can do to make sure that your project runs smoothly.
- Define the objectives – it’s vital you define what is to be achieved, by when and what budget you have available. Make sure you have these agreed by your project sponsor
- Establish clear terms of reference – this should outline the objectives, scope, time-frames and initial scale of resource required. They should also clarify any risks, constraints or assumptions already identified.
- Create a clear plan of action - the key is to break the project down into identifiable phases, and then into controllable units for action. Dividing a piece of work into more manageable, discrete units facilitates the functions of estimating, planning and controlling.
- Plan costs – make sure include all of the possible costs including staff time and wages, overheads, materials and supplies, equipment and any supplier costs
- Schedule the project – establish the shortest time it can take for your project to run. For this you’ll need to know the earliest time a piece of work can start, the duration, any interdependencies and the time it must finish
- Monitor and report on progress – agree what information and how often you will deliver it to the project team and key stakeholders
- Deliver the output – once delivered make sure it is acceptable to the customer or project sponsor
- Evaluate the project - By building in a final stage of evaluation it is possible to gain a measure of the project's success, and see what lessons can be learned. Once again, the three key areas for review are quality, time and costs.
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