Launch Project and Make It a Success

If you read my previous post you must have pretty good idea of what a project is. Perhaps you’ve watched some projects develop around you and you recognize some of them that you might want to take on. Now it is time to to find out what exactly project management is.

Project management means a leadership over a certain job that runs according to a certain plan from beginning to end. The objective of such leadership is to make sure the desired goals are reached, the required standards and deadlines are met and the budget and resources are not overspent.
As project management is a rather complicated structure I have decided to break it down into several key stages. Each one of them will be examined in the next posts. For now I am just going to list them and tie them to some examples for better understanding.

Defining your objectives and outcome.
Before you begin you will have to decide, what it is you want to achieve. The better perspective you have on your final goal, the easier it will be for you to find the shortest route to its execution. It is a bit like driving an automobile: if you don’t exactly know where you are going, it’s likely you won’t arrive to your destination in the near future if at all.

Planning your project, deciding your deadlines and resources.
Say you made a firm decision about the outcome: your aim is to drive to the neighboring town and see the town hall. Now you need to sit down and go over the details: your route, how long it’s going to take you to get there, how long the road is and how much petrol you might need. If its going to be quite far you might want to choose a place to stop for a night and perhaps to book a room in advance. You may want to look into the available alternative options for example, taking the train or bus.
Remember: whatever the desired outcome of your project is, if your planning is sound it will make it easier for you to meet your deadlines on time and in high quality.

Organizing your team.
If you are traveling with a group and you are the team leader you will have to decide what the responsibilities of other team members should be. It is also your job to see and make sure that the others know what they are doing. You’ll also be in charge of their performance and ultimately of whatever outcomes it might bring. It can be tricky especially if you don’t know your team yet. Trust me, a situation like this takes place more often than not.

Work management – solving problems as you go.
It seldom happens in real life that everything runs as smoothly as it was planned on paper. However, as a project leader you want to try and oversee every particular stage of your project’s development in order to deal with any problem that might arise right there and then. If you can catch the problem quick enough, you might be able to deal with it before it effects/undermines the project. Such planning for possible problems and their solutions is called risk management.

Finishing off your project.
This includes your actions after the job is done and your objectives are met. It’s more like tidying up after yourself: it’s making finishing touches, making conclusions, writing down some notes for your future projects, where your experience might help you along the way.

Mikhail Chigorin, famous Russian chess-player once said that “even a poor plan is better than none”. We can say that even a poor project management is better than no management.
Start using the project management tactics now and you will be surprised at the positive results they might bring.

You probably have a lot of things to do. You might have a demanding job or maybe you’re a student living under the pressure of your next examination, or you work from home. But no matter what you are constantly busy with work either for yourself or for other people. It could be anything: coordination of events, preparation for presentations, running a business meeting, decorating your house, passing an exam and even making a massive sandwich. How would you recognize what job is a project and what job is not?

To put it plainly a project is a job that is unique in its objectives and its final outcome is defined. In other words every project has to achieve a certain goal within a certain amount of time and under certain circumstances.

The chief criteria by witch to tell a project from a non-project job are the following three rules:

• A project displays clear desirable outcomes, which can be defined in words.
• A project has a beginning and an end. Big projects might be quite lengthy but they will not be infinite.
• A project relies on certain resources — finances, workforce, equipment or information.

All three of the above parts are balanced and interdependent, what means that if you shift one of them, you shift all of them. If the desirable outcome is increased despite the initial planning it will without a doubt shift the deadline forward and quite likely affect the budget. If a deadline is pushed forward, the eventual outcome will, most likely, fail to meet the desirable result.

Projects may be confused with other activities such as accounting, regular delivery of equipment or order processing. The difference of such an activity from a real project is mainly that the former does not have a deadline and is not directed to meet any unique objectives. However some single stages of such an activity may also be classed as projects within their own right.

The word project comes from the Latin word projectum from the Latin verb projicere, “to throw something forwards” which in turn comes from pro-, which denotes something that precedes the action of the next part of the word in time and jacere, “to throw”. The word “project” thus actually originally meant “something that comes before anything else happens”. When the English language initially adopted the word, it referred to a plan of something, not to the act of actually carrying this plan out. Something performed in accordance with a project became known as an “object”. This use of “project” changed in the 1950s with the introduction of several techniques for project management. Use of the word “project” evolved slightly to cover both projects and objects. However, certain projects continue to include so-called objects and object leaders.

Part of Wikipedia article

Of course, all projects differ. For example some of the differences are:

• The scale and the length of a project (making a paper plane or building a factory)
• The size of the workforce
• Whether it’s done for yourself or a third party
• Whether it’s done under a formal contract or just as a friendly agreement

In the end it does not matter how big or complicated your project is. Its chief methods of planning and management will remain the same. The better you understand these methods the more successful you are likely to become.