With my experience as a Project Manager, through this article, I am trying to collate what are typical best practices of project management I have learnt and what I practice in real time. This may not be the proven OR standard process but this is what I ended up doing to ensure project success in one of my recent project.

With Agile software development – one tends to associate a keyword called ‘adhoc’. But the fact is whatever the type of project is: fixed, waterfall, spiral – the agility exists and one needs to adapt and act smartly.

Recently, I accomplished a fixed priced project of 3 months duration that had its high level requirements already stated. But believe me this was as agile as any other project: with requirement changing until the end. This project had all the cycles/phases of project management right from Initiation, Planning, Execution, Monitoring & Control and Closure. These are typically called as Process groups.

How can one assure that every project they execute is successful? What are these key project management skills that ensure its success?

Let’s discuss on one of the key concept that makes project succeed or fail. Surprised! How this is just one area: well as per my experience and knowledge on project management this is the key:

“Setting right expectation to all the stakeholders at each phase of the project and at right time”

What does this mean?  Whether it is various knowledge areas or process groups: It is all about setting right expectation at right time with respective stakeholder.

Following are the key areas as per my priority list where right expectation needs to be set:

Expectation 1:  Project Goals – This typically covers all the processes, its input and output. So key point is: with what quality you want to achieve this, can you define a metric around each objective/goal that need to be achieved?

Expectation 2: Team member’s objective setting – These project metrics or goals can be achieved if one ties these to the objective settings for each team member (consisting of developer, testers…) in the project.

Once these are set – the next step is to track, monitor and control these. This can be done by measuring the metrics at frequent intervals depending upon the milestones and length of the project. Based on the information, one needs to take necessary corrective and preventive action. So, the end result would be you would re-prioritize and reset/rework on the objective setting. Some other key areas where this concept must be applied are:

Expectation 3: Setting Customer expectation – Whether it is timely status reporting or getting right information from Client: it again boils down to setting expectation with Client. This should have supporting data, reviews and feedback to ensure all stakeholders have a buy-in.

Expectation 4: Checking project progress at regular interval (at milestones) and re-setting expectation – This is the key piece to ensure that what was initially defined in scope is same as what is achieved. Getting this validated at frequent interval prevents last minute surprises and project failures.

I hope in this article, the message is very clear: irrespective of the type of the project in this agile nature; “define simple measurable steps, apply, measure and control”. You will find various jargons to illustrate this same principle: one of them being PDCA, also known as Deming cycle.

I hope this article has given some basic insight on ‘effective project management’ and information on ‘how to apply simple basic rules and ensure project’s successes’

Please post back with your thoughts and your own experience. We can debate on them.

Written by,
Shrinath Inamdar

Shrinath Inamdar Project Management Effective Project Management