Project World - page 4

Spearheading a project isn’t a walk in the park. You would be responsible for its planning, execution and completion, as well as the aggregation of separate tasks by teams and individuals into a cohesive whole. Grace under pressure is always an essential, but below are seven other key ingredients to lead a project to success:

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Managing any project can be tricky. Your job as the manager is to ensure each moving part is working towards a common goal, and diminish, if not completely eliminate, unnecessary processes that merely waste resources. Delegation is a necessity, and in order to be an effective manager, you need to understand the project inside out, and from different perspectives, i.e., from the perspectives of your team members, because this is how you gain their respect and loyalty.

This being the case, it is fair to say that managing multiple projects across different teams, all at once, is exponentially trickier. But it can be done and has been done. We list five things on how to manage effectively multiple projects simultaneously.

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If project management is a process that helps us achieve our goals through proper planning, organizing, motivating, and controlling, the smart way is to do it in a manner that optimizes available resources while effectively integrating them to produce desired results.

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Project management (PM) has always been about accomplishing a goal within a constraint, or a set of goals within a set of constraints. And while the core theory hasn’t changed, the route businesses travel between point A and point B is experiencing a dramatic shift.

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So you’ve decided that your organization has reached a point where a project management software is a necessity and is ready to invest the time, money, and effort to implement it. Planning doesn’t always equal reality, as the looming question of adoption is a normal hurdle for management to clear.

According to Pinnacle Management Systems, Inc. Specialists, adoption is a real challenge in implementing project management solutions. Will the workforce use the tool dependably? How long will it take before they’re truly adept at operating the software? Will it end up unused and gathering dust after all the time and money invested in it?

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Project management is a continuous struggle for balance between time, cost and quality. It’s no wonder why project managers want to make things more efficient and effective as possible.

Some may think manually creating a project plan is easy, since it’s formulaic. But if you ask any project manager, that isn’t necessarily always the case. There are routine processes that can be done without much thinking, yes, and this is where the opportunity for more time savings actually lies, as a good number of project management tasks and activities are routine in nature.

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Overworked and confused employees eventually become unproductive, even resentful employees. To avoid overwhelming employees with too much workload and task conflicts, thereby destroying morale, workload management must be in order. This begins with proper resource allocation and identifying the issues that must be addressed to optimize resource and workload management.

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There are plenty of employees that, aside from being expected to deliver stellar results in their fields of expertise, are also given the task of managing projects. This frequently happens in marketing, PR, education, consulting, IT, professional services, and even the public sector. Unfortunately, not all field experts are trained project managers and are hence called accidental project managers.

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Implementing tools and software rollouts to improve business and IT processes is a risky move, both financially and organizationally. Such implementations, when not considered with diligence and meticulous care, frequently end up providing the opposite of what management initially expects.

Case in point is the recent IT implementation problem that caused Philippine fast food chain juggernaut Jollibee, McDonalds’ top competitor and with thriving branches in the USA and other countries, to halt operations in 72 stores in Metro Manila. This botched IT upgrade, a supposed 0.5-billion peso (around $11.37 million) project, resulted to lost sales of 6% for just the seven days of August, which, in Jollibee’s 2013 revenue terms, is equal to roughly 92 million pesos.

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When managing a project, it is normally expected that all processes and activities essential to the completion of a project are completed on time and within budget. It is, more often than not, the “on time” and “on budget” parts that identify success in project management.

The Project Management Institute (PMI) defines project management as “the application of knowledge, skills and techniques to execute projects effectively and efficiently.” To ensure this success and aptly consider yourself an effective project manager, should you manage and execute every little detail of the project management plan yourself?

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