Communicating with management and customers plays an important part in project success. These words are worth repeating: “Successful projects meet stakeholder expectations.” This mantra for project managers bears repeating, with this addendum: Of all the stakeholders to satisfy, customers and management top the list. The communication plan should detail the strategy not only for informing…
Category: Project Management
How to Establish Project Control Through Effective Communication
Establishing project control involves discovering and solving problems while they are still small, measuring progress, and ensuring continued agreement on goals and expectations. The key to accomplishing all these things is communication—making sure that the right people have the right information at the right time. Strong communication among all stakeholders is what allows a project…
The Building Blocks for Writing a Proper Status Report
One of the most important pieces of project management is communicating about the status of your project. The status report can be an effective tool to help you communicate with others, near or far, about the timeline, budget, progress, and other details during the lifetime of your project. The status report also help you to…
Gain Perspective: Identify Project Stakeholders (Project Sponsor)
Stakeholder roles: Project Sponsor Many projects are organizational anomalies. They cross department and corporate boundaries; they staff up for short periods, then disband; they may span a portion of a budget cycle while drawing funding from multiple groups within a company. The temporary, ad-hoc nature of projects can create major problems for project managers because…
Gain Perspective: Identify Project Stakeholders (The Customer)
Stakeholder roles: The Customer Whenever a project exists, somebody will be paying for it. And whoever pays usually gets the first and last word on product description, budget, and the criteria by which success will be measured. Although other stakeholders may try to squeeze in extra requirements, the final say on the product will come…
Gain Perspective: Identify Project Stakeholders (Project Manager and Team)
Stakeholder roles: Project Manager What does a project manager contribute to the project? Magic, or, more precisely, practical magic. Just as a symphony conductor directs the orchestra to bring out the magic in the music, the project manager must keep all the disparate groups in a project moving in harmony. Whether he or she is…
Gain Perspective: Identify Project Stakeholders (Functional Management)
Stakeholder roles: Functional Management Working productively with the company’s functional management is important to the success of any project. “Management,” in this case, refers to functional management, also known as line management. These can be department managers, first-level supervisors, or executive vice presidents. With the exception of a project-oriented organization, functional managers are responsible for…
How To Define Projects and Get Your Stakeholders On The Same Page
How do you define projects? Who is responsible for what? Who has authority? What are our goals? How do we communicate? In most organizations, these questions were answered long ago; the unique nature of projects, however, means that all of these questions have to be addressed each time a project begins. How they are answered…
A Product Development Life Cycle May Contain Many Projects
One of the reasons project management techniques are increasing in popularity is because of their role in new product development. Whether the effort is a new drug, a new software product, a new model car, or a new baseball stadium, it is done one time and produces a unique product. Since product development has the…
What is a Project Life Cycle
A project life cycle represents the linear progression of a project, from defining the project, through making a plan, executing the work, and closing out the project. At first glance, it might seem that this life cycle is the same as the project management functions. Define, plan, and execute seem to map directly to definition,…