What are the important factors of project management

Table of Contents Show

Clear Project Goals and Objectives
Diligent Research and Data Gathering
Grounded Estimates and Plans
Optimized Workflow and Systems
Real-Time Progress and Resource Tracking
Scope, Change, and Priority Management
Healthy Team Culture
Documentation and Knowledge Management
A Solid Foundation Is Key to Project Success
What Are Critical and Key Success Factors in Project Management?
Why Are Critical Success Factors Important?
Project Managers’ Effect on Project Success
Clearly Defining Project Goals
Experienced Project Teams
Top Management Support Is One of the Most Important Critical Success Factors in Project Management
1. Accurately Defining and Communicating Project Goals
2. Understanding the Scope of Your Project
3. Communication Is the Key to Project Success
4. Manage Risks and Forget about Headaches
Managing Project Success

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rom the review of the literature, project success is defined as something that meets cost, schedule, and performance specifications. But, the projects’ success is far more complex [4]. For the last forty years or more, the project success was defined as the completion constraints…

The world is changing fast, but when it comes to managing successful projects, many things stay tried and true. Ultimately, you want to foster a powerhouse project team that’s focused on objectives and responsive to new information. Here are eight key factors that can help make a project successful.

Clear Project Goals and Objectives

To achieve success, it has to be clear what the project success criteria are. Before starting, help your team understand what you want to achieve — not just for your project but also for your client’s business or community.

Align with relevant stakeholders on your key performance indicators (KPIs), and if possible, keep them visible. As you arrive at critical decision points, go back to these goals to determine the best courses of action.

Read more: How to Write SMART Project Management Goals

Diligent Research and Data Gathering

One of the most important project success factors is the discovery phase, when project managers work closely with clients to gain more insight into their problems, industry, past initiatives, capabilities, and more. This will equip you with information to formulate better strategies and anticipate possible hurdles.

When projects start, it’s tempting to jump the gun and get to work. It’s exciting while you’re brimming with ideas. Plus, a quick and straightforward schedule can impress stakeholders.

However, it’s important to remember that the benefits of forgoing this critical stage are only temporary, and will quickly be eclipsed by their downsides. If you want to increase your chances of success, don’t skip the discovery phase!

Grounded Estimates and Plans

Unrealistic estimates and lofty promises are the most common ways project teams set themselves up for project failure. It can be tempting to give small, aggressive estimates because they seem to define the team members’ competence. But if you want to increase your project’s chance of success, you and your team may have to learn to set this ego aside or work around it.

Consider using good planning methods like planning poker, where discussions are encouraged around estimates. Look into your best, worst, and most realistic scenarios. Add padding and contingencies as needed. Conduct project planning according to how things are, not how you want things to be.

Optimized Workflow and Systems

Systems and workflows are set processes for your team to follow when implementing your project plans. They’re efficient ways to set expectations and manage communication. They also minimize confusion, which can be massively beneficial during the busiest phases.

Take the time to evaluate your workflow and system after critical phases of your project to spot inefficiencies. Check in with your team and stakeholders to identify areas you can automate and optimize project management strategies.

Barring extreme situations, it’s not advisable to do major overhauls in the middle of a project. Still, keep an eye on tweaks that can offer tremendous results.

Read more: Workflow Management Software and Tools: 2022 Guide

Real-Time Progress and Resource Tracking

Once you start executing project tasks, you’ll have a natural tendency to focus only on what’s at hand. But as the project manager, it’s your responsibility to keep your goals and project objectives in view. Without this presence of mind, you risk wasting resources and missing deadlines.

Nowadays, project management software is equipped with features for real-time task tracking and reporting, productivity monitoring, budget management and cost tracking, and more. Maximizing these features can enable you and your team to spot bottlenecks, foresee issues and delays, and stay in touch with your big objectives as you make incremental project progress.

Scope, Change, and Priority Management

With the rise of information overload, it can be tempting for teams and stakeholders to implement every new idea and iterate after every exciting insight. While project management methodologies such as Agile Scrum exist to welcome new findings and iterations, these iterations should still come with thorough discernment and evaluation.

Finding the balance between openness to new ideas and firmness against scope creep is critical for project managers. While change can be good, new changes in scope have to be evaluated against the project’s objectives and the availability of resources. Keep priorities clear to help your team manage their efforts — so they don’t go to waste.

Healthy Team Culture

If you’ve ever wondered how self-managing teams exist, then you’ve already stumbled upon the importance of healthy team culture.

A team’s culture defines what they consider normal and unusual. This influences their decisions and actions, regardless of whether they’re being supervised by management. Safety, empowerment, and accountability create a breeding ground for collaboration, constructive feedback, problem-solving, initiative, and grit.

Successfully maintaining this can help your team perform optimally, even when they’re left to their own devices.

Read more: Identifying & Managing Toxic Workplace Behaviors

Documentation and Knowledge Management

Another critical success factor in project management is constant improvement. In order for actions and decisions to be reviewed, they have to first be properly documented. Documentation can feel like an extra administrative task for project managers. But done right, it has many benefits.

Proper documentation and knowledge management can help you trace your team’s thought process. You can use this to communicate better with stakeholders, onboard new team members, and conduct object evaluations at the end of your project. Leveraging your previous findings in future projects is also made possible when these are adequately recorded.

Finally, documenting your project success can increase your team’s credibility and help you acquire more clients moving forward.

Check out these Project Management Courses from TechRepublic Academy!

A Solid Foundation Is Key to Project Success

The key to building an agile and productive team is providing a solid foundation with sound systems and values. This firm grounding in project management will empower project team members to explore new ideas, take risks, and ultimately succeed and innovate.

Projects are hectic by nature. In the sea of tasks, priorities, and deliverables, it can be easy to lose focus and forget what your critical success factors are for your project goals.

In this article, we’re going to show you how to identify key success factors for every project you lead and succeed!

What Are Critical and Key Success Factors in Project Management?

Before we get into the thick of it, it’s important to understand what critical and key success factors really are.

According to PRINCE2’s definition, critical success factors (CSFs) are “elements in a project that are critical to the project achieving its mission or goal.”

Fortunately, CSFs aren’t something vague.

They are clearly defined elements that you can track with Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

KPIs will help you understand if you’re managing all the elements properly.

Source: PRINCE2

You can also look at critical and key success factors in project management through a paradigm that starts with deliverables (things the project is supposed to create).

Critical success factors (CSF) define the things that the deliverable requires and the factors that ultimately define it as successful.

For example, your deliverable could be a house.

Your critical success factors would be construction workers and materials.

Your key success criteria would be creating a certain number of rooms, doing it within budget, and delivering it on time.

Finally, you could track the progress with schedule-related KPIs.

Why Are Critical Success Factors Important?

With 67% of projects running out of budget or time, it’s pretty clear that the majority of project managers and companies don’t completely understand their projects’ critical success factors.

In the end, you could end up completing irrelevant tasks first, instead of focusing on tasks that truly drive the project’s progress.

Risk management and lack of support also cause problems.

Maybe you wouldn’t have run out of time if you had top management’s support or if your team understood what the project was truly meant to create.

Critical success factors help you focus on the elements that are vital to your project’s success.

For example, if you were running a digitalization project in HR, you’d want top management’s support to deal with adoption and implementation.

Conversely, if you were launching a marketing campaign for a client, your critical success factor would be launching it on time by conducting the necessary research and creating the required materials.

In short, critical success factors are important because they help project managers:

Facilitate communication between different project stakeholders
Monitor and control scope, changes, and risks
Identify and prioritize goals and tasks
Identify and allocate resources
Remove bottlenecks in knowledge-sharing flows.

According to the Project Management Institute and other researchers, the following factors affect project success the most:

Formally established project managers with necessary skills and authority
Clearly set and widely understood project goals
Competent and experienced project teams
Top management support.

Project Managers’ Effect on Project Success

You don’t have to be a trained project manager for your project to be successful.

However, you need to have the necessary skills, such as communication, planning, and delegation.

Make sure you develop a plan with responsibilities and deliverables before getting to work.

Identify scope and risks early on, and monitor changes as they occur.

Clearly Defining Project Goals

As a project manager, you have to make sure that everyone on your team is on the same page.

The crucial stage here is the project initiation stage, at which you should make sure that your project team members understand what the project is set to accomplish, and which tasks are crucial to success.

Experienced Project Teams

When you’re managing projects, what you’re really managing are people.

You have to make sure that your team members have the necessary skills to complete the project.

Top Management Support Is One of the Most Important Critical Success Factors in Project Management

Finally, top management support is connected to goal-setting.

Your top management has to believe in the project’s ability to meet business needs, and they have to be willing to support you.

Your CSFs depend on your project.

However, you can generally identify and manage them by:

1. Accurately Defining and Communicating Project Goals

Firstly, you should use the SMART goal-setting method to define your goals. Your project goals should be:

Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Relevant
Time-bound.

So instead of putting a goal as: “Improve the way we hire,” you should phrase your goal as:

“Improve our candidate pipeline by attracting 100 new candidates through social media advertising within two months.”

Then, make sure every stakeholder understands why this goal is important.

For example, top management may think this goal is important because the quality of the candidate pipeline influences the company’s bottom line.

Teams may consider this goal important because it means they’ll be working with more professionals such as themselves, rather than working with people who don’t fit your company’s culture.

2. Understanding the Scope of Your Project

If you want your project to be successful, you have to understand and manage its scope.

Firstly, create a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS).

It will help you understand which tasks you need to complete in order to get the final product that will make the project successful.

Source: Project Insight

Secondly, identify task dependencies and set priorities.

Which tasks are the most important?

Which tasks can’t be completed until other tasks are completed first?

Chart your Critical Path to identify how much time it will take to complete the project, and how any changes affect the scope.

Finally, create a project scope statement and make sure all the stakeholders understand it.

If you’re working with external clients, it’s also good to establish a change and constraints policy.

3. Communication Is the Key to Project Success

Projects are dynamic, and it can be easy to drop the ball. That’s exactly why you should create a project communication plan:

Identify all the stakeholders
Establish roles and responsibilities
Outline communication processes, methods, and channels.

For example, you may need to communicate with top management through monthly meetings and formal documents.

Communicate with your team daily.

You can do it through a project management tool.

You may need to keep different team members informed on things related to their tasks.

4. Manage Risks and Forget about Headaches

Finally, every project faces risks and changes.

But the difference between a good and sub-par project manager is in the way they approach them.

Firstly, try to identify as many risks as possible at the project planning stage.

If a risk occurs, meet with stakeholders and create a plan for eliminating or mitigating it.

Don’t bury your head in the sand – be proactive.

Strive to understand root causes, and how they could affect your project success.

Managing Project Success

Being a project manager isn’t easy.

However, when you carefully identify your success factors, make sure all the stakeholders are on the same page, and monitor the progress of your project, there’s nothing to worry about.

Let’s get to work!

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