Have you ever dreamed to have a successful management of project yet you don’t know what and how to start? No worry! It seems that you must stay with us to deeply learn the project management principles. Believe it or not, these principles are the fundamental rules that you necessarily follow.
Though The Project Management Book of Knowledge does not contain an official list of the principles that should be implemented for a successful project, here we have derived them from PMI’s annual pulse survey that highlights the 9 applicable project management principles. Those are the formal project management structure, invested and engaged project sponsor, clear and objective goals and outcomes, documented roles and responsibilities, strong change management, risk management, mature value delivery capabilities, performance management baseline and finally the communicating.
Now let’s have a look at each one of these in a bit more detail.
Formal Project Management Structure
All projects must have a formal structure of management. The process, procedures, and tools are the part of management that must be formally structured. This is due to the fact that a project will be terribly hard to control without a format structure.
This way, a project must have a project charter, project plan and designated project team to set a priority. If these are already formalized, it will be just a piece of cake to manage the project.
Project Sponsor
Believe it or not, a project sponsor is one of the project management principles that is also critical to the success of a project. An effective sponsor engagement will make your project easier to communicate the progress, intensify the issue to overcome the obstructions and to lead the stakeholders to success through the decision-making process.
Objective Goals and Outcomes
There are two components that makes you easier to measure a project’s success. Those are the precise requirements and the approval criteria. Without these two components, it will be a bit difficult for the measurement process.
Perhaps, you think that your final project has already met the requested criteria except the user complain that you left out of the crucial component. The most typical factor causing the project to fail is a lack of clear goals. At the beginning of the project, the requirements and approval criteria should be clear and documented. Further, they need reviewing and approval from all the key stakeholders that include the sponsor and the customer.
Roles and Responsibilities
There are two forms you should use to define the roles and responsibilities involved in a project. For project team members, RACI or RASCI is commonly used to determine the duties as well as expectations. RASCI stands for Responsibility, Accountable, Sign-off authority, Consulted and Involved.
According to RACI chart, the team members are lined along the top with the tasks along the sides. Each of the member is given a letter (R, A, C and I) based on their role for each job. There are some important information that a stakeholder must take along with registering the documents. Those are contact information, communication preferences, level of influence on the project, engagement level with the project, the role for the company and other relevant details.
Management of Project Changes
In managing a project especially when it changes, it is highly recommended that the project is designed with the well-defined scope. This is aimed to make sure that the outcomes meet the customer’s expectations. Simply put, you must strongly change the management in order that your project could stand out of scope creep and grow well beyond the initial project guidelines.
For example, some stakeholders or team members may want to include additional features to a product. This way, there must be some changes that you should control if you don’t want end up with a product that comes in a great price but delivered five months late. This is too bad.
Therefore, if you decide to change the management of the project, you must be ready to control the changes.
Risk Management
Risk management is just another project management principles that you need to carefully learn. This is because we cannot always carry out a project in a bubble. All the risk may come as rain. Unfortunately, the risk can always affect your resources, processes and technology.
Thus, managing risk in considered important in order to minimize or even eliminate the impact on the projects. In this case, managing risk involves identifying, evaluating and monitoring the risk as well as deciding the action plans as the solutions toward the problem that occurs unavoidably.
Value Delivery Capabilities
Value delivery capabilities are the seventh principle in project management. They include your project tools, processes and procedures that help you deliver the value to the customers. They will also involve the project systems such as your scheduling software.
Thanks to the agile project methodology that is also often used in the process of managing a project. This way, you have applied the right approaches in delivering the successful projects, you will be equipped better than starting from scratch.
Remember, the more mature your process and procedures are, the more likely that your project reaches successfulness.
Performance Management Baseline
In relation to the project management principles, there are three basic components that the projects usually offer. Those components are the costs, schedule and scope. Each of these components possesses a baseline or a plan. However, the performance can always be measurable.
The baselines are integrated one to another, therefore, it is also popularly called a performance management baseline. Simply put, if you have a change in one of the components, the effect will be reflected in the others.
Let’s say you have already a scope. So you can see how the effect impacts on your project’s schedule and cost using your performance management baseline. Later, this will enable you to monitor the overall effect of the changes on your project.
Notice, a performance management baseline can improve the way you are making decisions. This is because you can view the whole picture and identify all of the impacts of the potential decision you have made.
Communication
The last principle in managing the project is communication. If you have ever worked in project management, you would clearly understand that project management is 90% communication. To create successful project management, communication is needed. In this case, not only the communication will determine the success of project management but also the risk, issues, and status at which they are all happening in the project team along with the other stakeholders.
It is important to keep in mind that communication is very much essential in many kinds of reasons, including:
- Task and schedule coordination.
- Keeping the stakeholder engaged.
- Decision-making and problem-solving.
- Conflicts identification and resolving.
- Escalating risks and issues.
3 Tips to Improve Project Management
Now that you have deeply understand the 9 project management principles on this post, here we add the 3 tips to improve your project management. The first tips is the quality communication. This way, communication and collaboration are the keys to success. Once you get ideas, share them and have a discussion with your teammates and project manager.
The second tips is to set boundaries especially when it comes to brainstorming new ideas. The third tips requires you to create such a flexible designs of high quality and creative products.
In relation to the principles used in project management, these three tips are considered crucial for successful creative project management.
Final Words
Overall, project management principles are very essentials to manage the project you are handling. Since they are the fundamental rules, you are recommended to follow them in order to easily manage the projects.
The principles will actually lead to know what to plan and what to do. Along with the tips we add into the post, you will completely be acknowledged to carry out project management.
