If your company has a team of Project Managers, it’s probably perceived as an overwhelming task and there may be people in your organization who think that a Project Manager is just a glorified project coordinator. But, the reality is that some projects can only be managed by Project managers. How does a project manager perform the critical task of directing people? Here’s a toolkit of project management tips for Project Managers:
A project manager must oversee everything and there is no shortcuts. As outlined on a prince2 Courses London certification.
There are many important factors to take into consideration when a project is underway and one of the most important is lead time – the time between the planning and execution of a project. Meeting the standard dates will greatly enhance a project’s success.
A good project manager will clearly define and document these processes. If you fail to define these documents and processes they run the risk of being done in a meeting room and you “get away with it”. A better way to ensure your processes are well documented is to enlist professional support.
Monitor your project closely
A primary responsibility of a Project Manager is to monitor the project’s progress and ensure that resources are allocated effectively. Monitoring at a high level for up to 12 months is very beneficial.
And be sure to gradually release authority until the project is complete.
“One step at a time” implies the sharing of information between Project Manager and business users ensuring that they can continue to function safely if they are unsure about any aspect of the project’s outcome.
Avoid a one- personality syndrome
The overall role of the Project Manager is relatively simple. However, roles within the organization will change as the project evolves and depending on your resources and their own roles within the organization, these may need to change. Be aware of this at the outset in order to accommodate this type of business and the shuffling of responsibilities. Building strong ongoing relationships with the key stakeholders in the organization is essential to successful projects.
Often, the Project Manager becomes a “front hindrance”. This could be a more technical version of ” Frontrange distract the Resort” in that the PM’s role gets defined before the business does. By not communicating this early, the resort for “front range” project work ends up being underestimated, thus spending valuable resources
Have trust in your PM
The integrity of a project manager is often a key factor for putting in the effort necessary for completion. As a result many project managers will agree to make key decisions or specifications without authority only to find that they have been subsequently over-informed or even will be completely unable to fulfill that decision. Over-informed is a flip side of not informing the resort.
It is important that anyone with the authority to make a decision believes they can do so. If the PM doesn’t have the authority to make the decision, or if the position of PM is under threat from other, more capable resorts, the resort will be uncomfortable and may even eventually be reluctant to consider the project. A good way of avoiding this problem is to conduct due process and seek expert opinion and feedback.
A consistent method of process and procedure
Proper project management involves a consistent approach to the entire project and each stage should lead the project to its desired conclusion. There should be set processes and procedures that are understood by all and followed throughout the entire project cycle no matter how little gets done or how large the change.
And by convention to understand, each stage is logically split into logical phases from a sensible and rehearsed strength of documented tasks, milestones and deliverables.
It is vital that any critical tasks on a phase input are optimized for value transfer to other phases in order to ensure every phase is properly addressed and converted in the end, contingent to a full initiative to closure.
Monitor, Report and Learn
You’ll find that of all modern project management tools there is no more powerful phase in the cycle than good time management. Keep to the schedule, at least as well as you can, not to the extent that it creates an unproductive backlog for the people who must execute the final phase; you simply never know where the expansion will take you.
