Project management is the discipline of organizing tasks, resources, and timelines to complete a project and achieve predetermined goals. It applies to various types of projects, such as software development and marketing campaigns. Regardless of the type of project, all initiatives typically follow the same life cycle that involves five key phases: initiation, planning, execution, monitoring, and closing. In this article, we’ll explore project management in more depth.
Benefits of Project Management
Project management makes the workflow more efficient, allows the team to have a mutual understanding of processes and deliverables, and instills a culture of responsibility in the group. Since all the to-dos and schedules are laid out, it’s easy to spot issues before they become costly problems. These are the specific ways project management benefits businesses:
Streamlines the Workflow
Project management for small businesses primarily organizes the workflow, as it clearly defines the necessary courses of action to achieve the predetermined goals. It compels you to take stock of resources, plot schedules, and identify critical tasks, guiding the team through the project phases and producing expected deliverables within a certain period. The increased efficiency contributes to the successful project completion.
Keeps the Team Aligned
Part of the project planning is setting goals, identifying the required outputs, and drafting a project plan that outlines all the necessary activities for completing a project. With a comprehensive document mapping out the entire initiative, the team gets to be on the same page, with each member understanding what’s expected of them. It removes confusion and inspires the team to be single-minded in achieving goals and finishing strong.
Increases Accountability Among Members
Project execution and monitoring largely involve using work visualization tools like Kanban boards and Gantt charts that readily display the developments over time and the people working on specific tasks. Since all team members, including project managers, see these boards, everyone feels accountable for their assigned tasks. This creates a culture of diligent, excellent work.
Anticipates Problems Early On
Handling projects entails creating timelines and using activity monitoring and scheduling tools, such as Gantt charts. This helps you see which tasks aren’t moving along and immediately address them, preventing delays in the completion of the project. Aside from keeping the team within the schedule, you reduce the likelihood of going over budget when you identify issues early on.
Enhances Stakeholder Relationships
The practice of project management involves analyzing who your stakeholders are early on in the project. Stakeholders are the people actively involved in the initiative or will be affected by its result. These include the team members, investors, financiers, suppliers, consultants, and customers.
By knowing who your stakeholders are, you can draw strategic action steps to secure their support early on, cultivate rapport, and ensure that your outputs are aligned with what they envision. Ultimately, you build strong stakeholder relationships, a defining feature of project success.
Phases of Project Management
Now that you know what project management is for, it’s time to delve into its phases. The phases are a key part of the discipline as they break a large initiative into manageable stages. It’s easier for teams to know what to do and accomplish when they follow these steps. More importantly, you get a quick snapshot of how the project progresses over time. These are the key phases giving you a project management overview:
- Initiation: The focus of this stage is to define the project. This involves writing a business case, a document that explains the project’s goals, laid out in the Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely (SMART) format. This is also where you would conduct a feasibility study, if necessary, and a project charter, which identifies the project scope, team members, and time frame.
- Planning: This phase aims to identify the finer project details. This entails creating a work breakdown schedule (WBS), a Gantt chart, a communication plan, a risk management plan, and a budget.
- Execution: This stage focuses on implementing the plans drafted in the previous phase. The most important aspect of this phase is managing the team and ensuring that everyone knows and embraces their responsibilities.
- Monitoring: This phase’s goal is to ensure everything is going as planned. You must keep an eye on these key factors that could make or break project completion: cost, timeline, risks, changes, and product quality.
- Closing: The focus of this stage is to officially end the project. It involves conducting a final assessment of the quality of outputs, completing paperwork (e.g., getting approval from stakeholders), and documenting the lessons the team learned from the project.
Examples of Project Management
To better understand project management, follow along how the phases apply to different initiatives. The action steps mentioned for each phase are sample tasks the team has to complete before moving to the next phase.
Initiation:
- Run a website analysis and competitor analysis to complete a business case for the project.
- Identify the web development team members and the executives who will approve the project.
Planning:
- Create a timeline for the website revamp.
- Review the style guide to ensure that the web design elements are aligned with the brand image and personality.
- Plot critical website metrics.
Execution:
- Create new web pages.
- Conduct keyword research and write new content.
- Draft a wireframe that visualizes the new website design.
Monitoring:
- Ensure that pages have breadcrumb navigation.
- Evaluate the search engine optimization performance.
- Optimize load times.
Closing:
- Revisit the checklist of deliverables.
- Present the final web design to company executives.
- Note a list of features to be added to the website in the future.
Initiation:
- Research which types of content competitors use.
- Analyze the topics your target audience engages the most.
Planning:
- Draft an editorial calendar.
- Allot budget for boosting content on social media.
- Determine team members’ roles: writers, social media specialists, and analysts.
Execution:
- Develop the content.
- Repurpose existing content to increase engagement.
- Distribute content to relevant social channels.
Monitoring:
- Ensure that the development and publishing of content are on track with the editorial calendar.
- Measure the return on ad spend.
- Analyze social media engagement.
Closing:
- Ensure that all the pieces of content in the editorial calendar are published.
- Conduct a meeting to gather learnings from the content team.
- Summarize the success of the campaign by creating a report that shows metrics.
Initiation:
- Conduct a product feasibility study.
- Create buyer or user personas.
Planning:
- Create a cost breakdown for the development of the new product.
- Determine when to release the product to the market.
- Create a marketing plan for product promotion.
Execution:
- Create the product.
- Explore different designs and solicit user feedback.
- Develop the marketing materials.
Monitoring:
- Address issues customers noted.
- Perform internal A/B testing on the marketing materials.
Closing:
- Review all the features the product is supposed to have.
- Hand off the product to company executives and stakeholders.
Types of Project Management
Since projects vary depending on the team’s goals and requirements, there are different approaches to project management for small businesses. The right method is critical to success, as it facilitates maximum workflow efficiency and team collaboration. Before starting a project, determine which type of management you’ll use from the following:
- Waterfall: Tasks are tackled one step at a time and finished sequentially. This is most fitting for projects with very few anticipated changes along the way. It’s best used for projects with strict adherence to sequential processes, like construction.
- Kanban: Tasks are divided into columns that represent their progress status. This is apt for projects with several tasks that must be finished simultaneously, such as producing assets for digital marketing campaigns.
- Agile: Tasks are divided into several phases called sprints, which is a predefined time period for delivering specific outputs. This is beneficial for projects with several anticipated changes, as in software development.
- Critical path method (CPM): The longest sequence of tasks to finish a project is prioritized to ensure the project won’t hit a delay. This is great for projects with strict deadlines and resource allocation, such as industries with complex initiatives like aerospace.
- Six Sigma: This involves identifying and removing defects that cause variations in product quality. This method is excellent for projects with a clear process of inputs and outputs and apparent variations in process inputs, such as manufacturing products.
- PRINCE2: The acronym stands for PRojects IN Controlled Environments and emphasizes organization and control when supervising projects. Teams must strictly observe a set of principles, including continued business justification, learn from experience, and defined roles and responsibilities. The practice of this method is popular among information technology projects and requires a project management certification.
Key Project Roles
One of the key aspects of managing projects is the discipline of defining roles and responsibilities in the team. This allows everyone in the group to understand what’s required of them, who’s responsible for what, and to whom each one should report. It removes potential confusion in the workflow and, therefore, makes the team more efficient in delivering outputs.
In this section, we’ll discuss what is a project manager and other key project roles:
Key Project Roles | What They Do |
|---|---|
Project Sponsor | Provides financial resources for the project |
Project Owner | Creates the project vision and gets funding from the sponsor |
Project Director | Leads a team of project managers, which includes external parties like contractors and subcontractors |
Project Manager | Plans and oversees project activities while managing deadlines and resources |
Project Coordinator | Manages daily activities and communicates with stakeholders, especially team members, to ensure that the project is progressing efficiently |
Project Administrator | Handles administrative tasks, such as scheduling meetings and preparing reports |
Project Analyst | Gathers and studies data, such as key performance indicators, financial forecasts, and legal and regulatory frameworks, to support project managers in decision-making |
Project Team Members | Executes the tasks assigned and reports to the project manager about the progress |
Top Project Management Solutions
Now that you know what is the role of a project manager and other key positions in the project, we’ll explore the tools you can use to make handling projects more efficient. Use these project management software solutions to improve your workflows.
Featuring robust tools for managing tasks, monday.com allows users to configure their project boards with different views. The Table view makes plotting and assigning tasks easier, as it offers different columns that represent various task management categories, e.g., assigned team members, deadlines, and statuses. Its Calendar view lays out tasks in a timetable, which may be customized by day, week, or month.
See project activities in a timeline on monday.com. (Source: monday.com)
The Gantt view shows tasks in a timeline format and displays milestones and dependencies. Use the Files view to see all your documents (e.g., contracts, invoices, budget reports, and business plans) in one place. monday.com’s monthly subscription plan starts at $10 per user for a minimum of three users.
Asana is a great software solution for resource management, offering workload and time tracking features. Workload lets you see how the tasks are divided among team members and who’s working on what. It’s easier to redistribute to-dos when you have an overview of who’s overloaded or underloaded with assignments.
Distribute the team’s workload strategically using Asana. (Source: Asana)
Time tracking shows how much time individuals spend finishing a task. With this, you’ll estimate project completion time and foresee if there will be a delay that might cause you to go over budget. If you’re interested in using this platform, subscribe to its entry-level plan for only $13.49 per user, per month.
Trello is the ideal platform for teams managing small-scale projects because it has a simple, intuitive interface. Its default view is a Kanban board, which lets you put tasks in cards that can be dragged and dropped to their appropriate task categories. Butler, Trello’s built-in automation tool, removes the manual work of managing boards. It automatically moves cards to appropriate columns, sets due dates, and crosses off accomplished tasks when the proper triggers are set.
Automate workflows on Trello. (Source: Trello)
Aside from powerful workflow automations, Trello offers access to various project views: table, timeline, calendar, and map. It features a workspace table view, which displays projects and tasks across different workspaces in a spreadsheet format. The provider’s entry-level plan is priced at $5 per user, per month.
Frequently Asked Questions
The main purpose of project management is to help teams plan, organize, implement, and track all the work involved in a project. Since initiatives involve several tasks and moving parts, the discipline allows teams to streamline efforts and complete the project within the set time and budget.
A project management system may mean two things. The first one refers to the entire set of processes involved in finishing a project. The second meaning points to the software solutions equipped with productivity, team collaboration, and project views features.
To ensure successful project delivery, you must follow these best practices:
- Be clear about project scope and objectives: The project scope determines the boundaries of the project, which will dictate the resources to be used and the deliverables expected. The project objectives, on the other hand, help you filter activities, as you would want every effort to contribute to achieving your goals.
- Hold regular meetings: Monitor progress and increase accountability among team members by asking for updates on what they’re working on. Deepen their appreciation and motivation for work by making them share what they’ve been learning in the process.
- Manage risks: At the beginning of the project, identify the risks you’ll encounter. For each risk, you must know what to do if ever they become an issue that will hamper the progress of the project. Learn which risks you should avoid, transfer to a third-party entity, reduce impact, or accept.
To know more about the best practices for overseeing projects, check our extensive guide on project management for small businesses. It also includes a list of considerations when choosing software solutions, which will help you find the best tool for your needs.
Bottom Line
The practice of project management boosts productivity and workflow efficiency, driving teams to be clear about goals and deliverables, monitor progress closely, and collaborate effectively. Successful project managers follow the phases of a project from end to end to complete initiatives successfully. They also determine roles intentionally among members to make responsibilities and expectations transparent. Lastly, to make the entire journey less overwhelming, they maximize software solutions with robust features for project views, collaboration, and workflow automation.
