5 Effective Tips to Achieve Project Success

A project is considered successful if it makes use of the right resources, stays within the budget, gets delivered on time and above all, meets the expectations set in the beginning. So why is project success elusive despite experienced project managers knowing what needs to be done?

For one, managing projects is harder when several competing interests have to be balanced. In the process, priorities get overridden which results in the wrong things getting measured, or not measured at all (which is far worse). Businesses know that time is money. After all, the lesser time it takes to get the job done without compromising build quality, the more costs you save, especially when it comes to skilled labor. For every hour that exceeds the originally drawn estimates, your billing potential rises. This inevitably creates a financial overrun no client would be happy to hear about, especially if the outcome still wasn’t up to the mark.

The trick is to enable your employees to do more ahead of schedule, thus leaving room for fixing errors and reviewing milestones reached before crossing the project finish line. The tips that make every minute of the project clock count begins with;

1. Lining up optimal schedules

Projects and people have to be given equal weighting, given how one can’t exist without the other. In order to get this right, you need unconditional insights into the workloads that your workforce is on currently, which is best visualized on a resource management software. Besides letting you check in on multiple in-flight projects, optimal schedules reflect both absences and bookings across the enterprise, preventing any skill from being over or under assigned. This way, activities stay in sequence and have the best qualified staff to get core work done at the earliest.

2. Recording priorities

Create a queue for project tasks and rank them by order of importance, from low to medium to high priority. Creating a master list of priorities not only alerts your staff to the items they need to look into but also gives you detailed insights into expected outcomes. What’s more, both you and your project team can get a clearer idea of what the project entails, allowing members to contribute and step in where they’re needed. With everyone multitasking as a cohesive unit, more work gets completed in a relatively shorter time without resulting in a burnout.

3. Being a realist

Project managers have to look at a project’s feasibility realistically,i.e. in terms of what looks possible in the deadline given. This means looking at it from a team perspective, in addition to the business and technical angle. In order to leverage the capabilities optimally, the next logical step following an assessment of the costs, benefits and risks is to check for resource availability and sufficiency. After all, it is possible for the staff you have in mind to be on leave, unavailable or busy on a parallel activity, making the case to reshuffle existing resources or request for additional ones. In other words, schedules should reflect the deadline, task and people assigned to work on them such that every competent resource is matched to the project.

4. Collaborating cohesively

It’s one thing to assemble competent staff, but quite another to make them a dream team. The right skills are of little use when they’re being hoarded in a time crunch, not to mention the resultant dysfunctional team dynamics. This is the reason most businesses encourage collaboration over competition. Besides generating points of view different to yours, team-wide participation facilitates free-flowing information and knowledge transfers, which are essentials in documenting a project.

5. Reskilling roles

Businesses face two key challenges today; one is that technologies are scaling up and evolving dynamically and the second is the skilled workforce needed to drive large scale, multibillion dollar projects. After all, you fall behind the pack if you have identified a suitable line of service but run low on a competent and capable workforce. AI, IoT and machine learning sciences will all have a say in the roles being created and how much more the future generation of workers will achieve through the power of automation. While shifting workers to more productivity-enhancing roles, some of the skills modern businesses will want to complement these technologies with would include IT, interpersonal and problem solving skills.

Did these tips aid in your process success? Let us know in the comments below!

Author bio :

Aakash Gupta heads the Business Sales wing at Saviom. As chief consultant on enterprise resource management and workforce planning solutions, his publications have helped project experts redefine business efficiency. Reach out to him here to know more.