C O N T E N T S
- What is project management?
- General Project Management Principles
- Goal Setting
- Project Chunking
- Tracking & Documentation
- Tailoring Project Management
What is project management?
So, what exactly is project management? There are a lot of great definitions for project management - To put it it simply we believe that at it’s core project management is the art and science of organising and executing tasks to achieve objectives. To put it artistically it's like orchestrating a symphony, where every instrument plays a crucial role in creating a harmonious masterpiece to create joy for the listeners.
A project can be anything from redecorating your downstairs toilet to creating your own business. Every project is unique but they all share similarities. They have phases or stages, like the researching, the creating, the reviewing. They have stakeholders, from bosses to partners, team mates, friends, family, neighbours. They have budgets and resource constraints, like…yourself and £0! They have project timelines & roadmaps, of when things started and finished - and perhaps sometimes these dates had to be readjusted…
While how these things are managed may not define if a project is successful or not, they will tell you how successful a project could be.
There is a lot that makes up project management and it varies widely depending on the nature and context of the project. Goals, principles, graphs, tools, apps emails,, workflows and countless other things are involved in ‘managing a project’ but it is it people who engage with it - so we think it’s best to start with the people!
General Project Management Principles
Effective project management needs effective principles. While there are many similar principles to project management; there are no right or wrong ones, only the principles that work for you.
Here are a couple of key principles that we believe can apply across most projects.
Goal Setting
Goal setting is crucial to any project. It is where you want to end up or what you want to achieve. There are no right or wrong goals; a goal of “having fun” is equal to “increase signups by 20%”. A goal drives the methodlogy & mindset for the rest of the project. One commonly used approach to goal setting is the SMART framework.
Goals come in many forms. Individuals may have simple statements, businesses may use KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) or OKRs (Objective and key rates). Whatever the goal type & your approach, it’s key they are clearly communicated as they will drive each underlying task in the project.
Project Chunking
There are a lot of psychological principles that can be applied to project management; a key one; that is widely used across all industries is the paper “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information” where George Miller asserted that the span of immediate memory and absolute judgment were both limited to around 7 +/- 2. He also notes that larger pieces of information can be recalled better by grouping through similarities then further into manageable numbers; chunking.
Breaking down your project into manageable chunks can be applied to all aspects of your project, right from the number of goals you set, how you roadmap tasks, how you tag them & how you review your projects.
Tracking & Documentation
Comprehensive project tracking and documentation may not necessarily affect the outcome of your project, but it absolutely will affect your ability to step back and understand how you got to that outcome.
Tracking your key metrics at identified intervals will help you get better insight into your project performance through ought, which is key if parts of your project may need change based on other factors.
How you choose to document things, such as minor task updates, design decisions, spending decisions can be done in a variety of ways from pen and paper to pre built CRMS with logging. More granularity and detail will mean more time spent on needing to think about how you documentation should work and actual logging tasks, but does give you much greater insight.
Tailoring Project Management
While applying general principles gives your project a good foundation, the reality is every project is unique, and the goals and objectives will apply to specific stakeholder(s) needs.
With that in mind, it’s important to understand how to tailor your project management principles & processes to meet the needs of a project.
Understanding stakeholder needs
capacity planning