5 Project Management Steps

What are the five most important steps on the way to project management success? The right allocation of project manager time is a proven key to every project's success.

5 Project Management Success Steps

These 5 points described below are equally important: it cannot be that we will keep improving quality with disregard to budget or resources, but we also cannot drag the project forever to fine-tune the product even more. We will get back to that later.

• Schedule verification: meaning how long our project is to take, what its stages are, and whether everything goes according to plan at any given moment. Why is scheduling important? Let us come back to gastronomy: let us assume that preparing a sandwich for a guest in the coffee shop takes about 7 minutes. During that time, it must be made and served. If we make it earlier, it is economical for us and it helps us prepare the next dish. If not, the next client may wait a bit longer for their order. Naturally, it is a large simplification, but it looks like this more or less. If we are developing an application for the client, we have a deadline provided and must distribute and conduct work to finish a finished product before the set time. Thus, a schedule helps to analyze at which stage we currently are, whether the milestones which we set for ourselves are being exceeded or whether we have any delays. Without a schedule, the entire work seems to be blindly going into things.

• Quality Verification: We want our product to be of high quality. At the beginning of a project, we set out what we are going to pursue, what we expect, and in what way we are going to meet the client's needs. It is important for the final product we make, and even the prototype of it, to meet all our assumptions. Gastronomy seems to be a good source of examples here as well: in a restaurant run by a close friend, venison burgers are served. Each burger has a specified portion of meat and additions. The burger restaurant's high ratings are achieved, among other things, by the high quality of burgers prepared by the kitchen. Quality control takes place at 3 workplaces: the grill, where the meat is fried; during packaging, to see if all ingredients and sauces are properly selected and their weight is appropriate; and The last stage is aesthetic verification. Quite obviously, people eat with their eyes. This is why our project should be verified concerning quality at several stages, because it may turn out that mistakes that occurred at the beginning will translate into low quality at the end of the process.

• Budget verification: each project has a budget. These are resources, knowledge, and, primarily, money, which we need to pay to our employees, contractors, suppliers, etc. We spend the budget on materials, know-how, work, utilities, etc. Every project's milestone should be a moment that we will devote to analyzing if we fit into the assumed costs. Many programs to manage projects have the option to verify this state of affairs and inform the users about it. Exceeding the budget may mean that the project will not be finished if we do not acquire additional funding. On the other hand, if we are going to run projects according to lean methodology, we have much greater chances of not only fitting into the budget but saving money as well.

• Team verification: the people we will work with during the project have a great impact on the success of the project. Jake Knapp presented a certain idea that shows what the project team should look like in the project sprints described by him. This method works with every project because it allows an optimal selection of people. The team should be composed of a decision-maker, a financial expert, a marketing specialist, a customer service specialist, a logistics expert, and a person responsible for the design. Even such a minimalist team, composed of people with narrow specializations, allows efficient and deliberate work. This works because it is always possible to use the knowledge of an expert at any given moment, who will advise or object, and this is important in projects.

• Stock verification: the stock is all the tangible and intangible things that we will need to perform a task. In the above burger restaurant, it will be burger ingredients, in the developer team—software, knowledge, equipment, etc. When we decide to carry out the implementation, we need to make sure that we possess a sufficient amount of stock and that if we do not have the option to store, we still have the option to constantly supply the stock without undue delays. Why without undue delays? Because a few days of hold-up translates into losses, it may also lead to failure to meet the deadline.

Above we have presented the 5 most important points which appear on the way to the success of a project. They show the direction of activity and what is most important for fast and efficient performance. If we think about them, the chance of finishing the task on time and without unnecessary costs is much higher than when we do not follow the above rules. Blind action might just as well lead us to the finish line, but at what cost?

Each project has a beginning

Whatever project we talk about, it consists of a few stages, if you will, which have an immense impact on its success. A project can be, for example, providing the client with a cup of coffee in a coffee shop; it has to be properly prepared in order so that it meets the client's needs and it also needs to be prepared so that its sale is profitable for the barista. The situation is similar to other tasks that are supposed to lead us somewhere. This is why it does not matter if we are conducting an agile project, creating a new website, sewing clothes, or even preparing a sandwich for a client in a restaurant; it is important to see each task as a certain path, which has its beginning and end. The beginning of the project management steps could be an idea for a new application or an order placed by the client; the end is the finalization of the task.