Last Updated on April 14, 2024 by Umer Malik
How long does it take for you to plan gathering the entire department in one room? And how long does it actually take when you start? There is always a nice time gape between the two. There can be many reasons for this delay, but the core is: communication.
The longer you take to inform people that there is a meeting and they have to gather, the longer they will take to respond and obey! Now if gathering people in one room with utmost disciple is such a hassle, imagine heading a whole project.
Project management is one the most dainting tasks your bosses can assign you. But given the opportunity, one certainly feels pumped up to a new level. Today, project management is largely automated. More than 50% of all planning is done on laptops and tools, not to mention the to-do list trackers and calendars.
Such tools and software make things much easier, however some lacks remain. To see results blooming very soon from the project, planning should be at the core of all your projects.
If you or your team feels scattered and motivated in the middle of a project, you need to improve your planning. Here are some practical measures to help you!
What Can Go Wrong?
Now what are some possibilities that your supposedly perfect plan can go wrong? And if it was do go wrong, what made you or the team feel like it’s perfect in the first place? Projects demand everything to be quantified. Whether it’s the possibility of a system breakdown or any other risk, you have to quantify it.
This is one reason risk management is a crucial aspect of projects and project management. Risk has to be the core and because of this, you have to allocate twice the time and twice the resources you would plan otherwise.
You never know when an employee gets sick or takes a long leave, if someone resigns and you have to rehire or if the finances are suddenly not enough. All this is the reason we recommend that you always calculate the chances and make sure nothing goes wrong.
One way most project managers do this is set a big budget and allocate a big time frame for something that isn’t so gigantic. While this can mean you waste some resources, you will always have ample time for things ahead.
Book printer near me writes more on how to manage risk in a project, feel free to read on!
5 Top Tips For Project Planning:
Here are some tips we have tested on various projects and found quiet positive results. However, which tips suits you might depend on your project’s size and length. So go ahead and apply each of these to figure out which one works best for your projects!
1) Make A Team (Division Of Labour)
Division of labour is the key concept most organizations build from small sole traders to PLCs. Whether managing a project or dealing with employees in a million dollar company, this method works.
Dividing labour and making them specialise at what they can do best can give you optimum results. However, if you have less members on the team, this might be a little hard. You might have to handle more than one task, and so would some of your team members.
Even then, what you can do is allocate one aspect of the projects to one person for a specific amount of time. Once that period is over, the member can move on to doing something else!
2) Project Management Tools
This is the automation we talked about in the introduction. Since everything in organizations is based on systems these days, there is no harm in planning projects on a software. However, this might mean there’s no backup if the system data vanishes one day.
So our first advice when using systems to manage a project is to always keep a backup. You never know when you might need the files in backup! Moreover, project management tools help with much more than just checking items on a list. Here are some benefits of spending on software like Google Project Management:
- Better resource allocation and management
- Better communication and collaboration across teams
- Easy remote work in times of access issues
- Improved level of scheduling and planning
- Easier budget planning and forecasting
- Better risk management and risk aversion
- Makes easy to track project evolution and changes
- Makes comparison and analysis easier
3) Reflecting Back
For lengthy projects that don’t only take up more time but budget as well, this is crucial. In fact even for smaller projects that don’t take up much time, reflecting back should be a focus. It is important to check the old metrics, analysis figures and statistics.
Based on these results from the priecg management tools, you can make comparisons and evaluate the progress so far. This also ensures planning is at the core of your project since you’re essentially looking back at how good your policies are going.
If you notice any lacks or ‘going out of plan areas, simply mark them and reflect on what went wrong. This way, you will also know before time if you’re about to err somewhere.
4) Setting Short Goals
Small milestones are the best for managing and planning your projects. You can set goals for your team that are reachable and make sense to complete within a small period of time. This can give the team members tiny achievements to celebrate.
Moreover, they will feel closer to the goal when they start achieving milestones. Remember, motivating the members should be a key focus when planning things out in projects.
Make sure you not only make these milestones but make your policies align with them. If it’s some very important aspect of a project, include more milestones so the team members focus on each sub-goal.
Conclusion:
Therefore, projects don’t just need good planning. They also need that planning to sustain. You don’t just have to make plans and goals, as a project manager you have to make a policy.
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