Computer Project Management

How successful are the projects you manage or contribute to? Research into why some projects deliver while others fail indicates some key factors leading to successful outcomes. Here are some things you can do and a selection of project tools and resources you can use to improve your chances of success.

From the outset, seek out and adopt a committed project sponsor who can overcome organizational roadblocks on your project. Find out who your project’s stakeholders are and communicate with them regularly. Our project management guide will help you identify your key project stakeholders and compile a stakeholder communication plan.

Prevent errors and misunderstanding from propagating throughout your project. Decide the project phases for your project and the key go/no go decision points. What are the expected project outputs for each phase and what are the quality criteria that need to be passed before moving on to the next phase? Use our project management primer to find out more about project phases and quality reviews.

Divide and allocate project tasks clearly and keep on top of your project schedule. Communicate regularly project progress to all project team members and the governing committee. Our project management tracking tool will help you schedule and track tasks and create automated project progress reports for all of your key stakeholders.

Stop your project from blowing out by keeping a firm control on proposed project changes. And don’t let an unforeseen event sink your project. Find out what risks can threaten your project and build a risk mitigation strategy into your project plan. Likewise, keep on top of all of your project issues before they get out of hand. Find out more about project change control, risk management and issues management by consulting our project management guide. For ready to go change control, risk and issues registers, download our Project Master project management tool.

Use the right project documents for the right purpose, without letting your project drown in a sea of documentation. Whether you are running a large-, medium- or small-sized project, decide from the start which project documents your project needs to generate. Our project management guide explains the purpose of the most common project documents and contains reusable samples ready for you to customize for your specific purpose. If you are running training projects, use the specialist document templates and guides contained in our Training Projects Template Pack.

In order to clarify business owner and other project stakeholder expectations, you will have defined the measures of success of your project even before your project began. Now that your project is completed, you will need to report the success of your project using the previously agreed success criteria. Our project reporting tool will help you define in measurable terms your success criteria and then compute and report on one summary page how your project performed.

Every project is a valuable learning experience for everyone involved in the project. Successful project managers work hard to get feedback from project team members and the other stakeholders. From this they discover what went well and what did not go so well. These lessons can then be applied to the next project. Our project management guide provides some useful tips on how to conduct a project post-implementation review and contains customizable survey forms that you can use on your project.

Expert View Author: Leslie Allan AIMM MAITD