Behind every successful project, there is a project manager. But many people think that a project manager can only remind his team about deadlines, call meetings and nothing else. However, such is simply not the case. Project managers need to develop a clear understanding of some key areas so that they can perfectly implement them. This blog will give you some useful project management tips that will surely help you boost your chances of project success.

The Project Life Cycle

Project management is all about the implementation of skills, productivity tools, task management software, knowledge and techniques to meet the requirements for a project. The most important elements of any project life cycle are:

• Planning
• Execution
• Tracking
• Reporting

These four aspects can play a great role in project management success and can define the roadmap to achieve success.

Strategic Planning and Goal Setting

The first key step towards a successful project management is planning and developing a roadmap that your team can easily follow. This phase starts with establishing goals that are clear and smart at the same time.

Focus on CLEAR Goals

It is an entirely creative method to set goals that are (CLEAR) Collaborative, Limited, Emotional, Appreciable, and Refinable.

Try Setting SMART Goals

This goal setting technique ensures that you establish goals that have been carefully assessed and at the same time clear enough for the entire goal setting process. Try setting goals that are: (SMART) Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely.

During this whole phase of strategic planning, it is important to clearly define the project scope to your team along with a project management strategic plan development. This will help project managers to determine the cost, available resources, quality and a realistic deadline. When everything is clear at the beginning, everyone in the team knows what they are accountable for, this will ultimately keep them on the right track.

Project Execution

At this phase when deliverables will be established, the entire project management team needs to manage a lot of things such as performance meetings, status reports, project updates and resource performance reports. Therefore, it is very important that your project management team is informed about their roles to efficiently complete their tasks. Tasks that must be completed during project execution phase include:

• Allotting resources the right tasks
• Implement project management plans
• Establishing monitoring system
• Status updates and performance meeting
• Make changes in project plans if needed
• Accomplishing task assignment
• Modifying project schedule

Although the phase of monitoring and tracking has a few different requirements, these two phases of project management life cycle happen spontaneously. This is where an online task management system can do the wonders and helps your team to communicate effectively, increase productivity and update their task status without any hassle.

Performance Monitoring

This phase is all about tracking and measuring project performance and progression to ensure that everything is on track and according to the project management plan. At this point, project managers badly need to use some performance indicators called KPIs to monitor if the project is aligned with the expectations. Usually, project managers use some KPIs to measure resources’ performance, including:

• Monitor if a project is on budget and time – this will help you analyze whether the project can meet client’s requirements.

• Carefully track project performance and changes occur in the project – this will help you quickly identify and address any issues that hinder project progress.

• Check the quality of tasks – this will help you determine if a specific project deliverable meets the defined quality standards.

• Budget tracking and analysis of efforts made by resources – this will help project managers to measure the cost and efforts being made by resources to check if your project is on the right track. This will help project managers to determine whether the project will be completed on time according to the current performance.

Project Reporting/Completion

In the phase of project completion, project reports should be created in terms of cost, time and scope to ensure that every team member will be saving information on a regular basis. Good reporting provides project managers a clear picture of where your team and project stand.

Once a project is get done, project managers will arrange a meeting to recognize valuable resources and analyze what went well in the project and spot issues that slowed down project progress. This works best because there are some project management mistakes that can be avoided so that perfections can be made for upcoming projects.

When the project is over, as a project manager you are responsible to doing more tasks. You need to compile a list of tasks that have not get done during the project and work with your team members to complete them. In addition, project managers also need to create a final project report and collect all important documents, deliverables and collect them in one place. An online project management tool works best in this regard and gives you an easy way to collect and save all important documents and information in one single place throughout the whole project.

Contributed byhttps://www.taskque.com/