What Constitutes a Successful Project?
What are the common issues with completing projects? How do you ensure project success? Keep reading to learn the best practices with project management and project success.
Poor project planning? Ineffective project management? Whether it’s technical difficulties, poor stakeholder communication, or one of the hundreds of variables that businesses must consider while working on a project, achieving a successful project is much more difficult for companies than some give credit to.
If you’re wondering what is considered a successful project, look no further. By definition, a successful project is when business requirements, schedule, budget, and the expected value to clients are all met.
The tricky part? Pivoting your strategy around the numerous variables and complications that may arise.
Common Issues with Completing Projects:
Although the extent of possible issues that can arise during a project are boundless, here are 2 high-level common issues that derail projects.
1. Complexities of Project Management
Problem: Running a successful project requires a great deal of planning, coordination, and communication between various stakeholders.
Between balancing the demands of different departments, setting realistic timelines, and ensuring everybody has the same understanding of the goals; it is a difficult task that requires constant monitoring and attention to detail.
Solution: Establishing clear communication channels is essential to ensuring that all stakeholders retain a clear understanding of goals, timelines, and deliverables.
Additionally, utilizing certain project management tools that fit the requirements for the project will help you plan, organize, and monitor project progress.
Progress meetings are a great way to keep the whole project team (both internal and external) in the loop with the various new and ongoing developments of a project.
2. Uncertainty and Risk
Problem: Many projects often come with a certain level of uncertainty and risk from both internal and external factors that are out of the control of the project team.
Examples of this are market changes or unforeseen challenges that can cause unexpected hiccups to the flow of the project.
Solution: Effective Risk Management and Contingency Planning is essential to mitigating risks and keeping projects running as smoothly as possible.
How Do You Ensure That Your Projects are Successful?
Project Planning:
Having a well-defined scope, timeline, and budget that extensively details the necessary key items of the project will ensure that each stakeholder has a clear understanding of the expected outcomes.
Project Management:
Project managers who are effective in concise communication, resource allocation, risk management, and people management are ideal for your project, no matter the size of the project.
Qualified Team:
Inadequate team skills or lack of expertise among team members will likely negatively impact projects.
Impact areas include quality of work, reduced productivity causing delays within the timeline of the project, and the likelihood that less qualified employees will not be able to identify or manage potential risks.
This could cause not only delays to the project timeline, but also affect the budget of the project and ultimately cost companies more in the long run.
Risk Factor Consideration:
Successful projects proactively identify and manage risks and issues throughout the project lifecycle.
This involves identifying potential risks, developing risk mitigation strategies, and addressing issues in a timely manner to minimize their impact on the project's success.
Planning for unexpected issues is not possible since you can’t know what issues may arise until they do; however, you can give yourself enough breathing room within the project timeline to estimate for certain technical difficulties or unexpected delays.
Constant Reviews:
As projects continue to develop, especially among larger impact-heavy projects, certain requirements may change such as the scope of the project itself, the roles certain team members must play, or even deadlines for certain deliverables that affect the timeline of the project.
It is important to continuously check-in with team members through progress meetings and other forms of communication to stay on top of all the variables.
This is a form of quality control, which ensures that all deliverables and progress is moving according to the expectations of the stakeholders.
Communication:
Although communication problems aren’t a stranger to smaller projects, larger and more complex projects are more prone to experiencing it.
Communication outlets and collaborative project management tools will help ensure that all stakeholders are effectively communicating, which will help avoid misunderstandings, unrealistic expectations, and more.
More from Red Pill Labs
