The 5 Golden Rules of Project Management
Managing a project can be the most fun you’ve had with your clothes on! I can’t think of a career path that pretty much means that you are constantly working at the forefront of change. However, anything that’s fun does have its dangers so it’s important to stay safe.
Here are my five golden rules to project management that have I’ve picked up over many years.
Rule 1: Get inside the head of your sponsor.
Many underestimate the role of the sponsor in a project. Manage your sponsor well and you’ll reap the benefits. Sponsors aren’t there just to agree the initial brief with you. It’s your job to ensure they have an active role in the project from start to finish. Remember, very often in a fast moving business they will be key to ensuring the project goals are still viable. Sponsors should be working with senior stakeholders to sell the benefits of the change your project will bring and letting you know about how changes in the organisation may impact. So my advice is to meet with sponsors at least once a fortnight to make sure they understand where the project is at, but you also understand how the business is feeling about the change.
Rule 2: Agree how and when you will communicate and stick to it.
Some people believe that it’s impossible to over-communicate. I completely disagree! If you’re knocking out e-mails and reports on a daily basis, most people will be trying to work out how to get your e-mails directly into the spam folder by day 3. So at the outset, agree your communications plan and stick to it. Some people key to your project may not want to be bothered unless there’s a change to the plan. So be it. No one will thank you for flooding their inbox!
Rule 3: Revisit your plans constantly.
A common mistake people make when managing a project is to create a plan and set it in stone. This is like agreeing at the age of 7 what all your birthday presents will be until you’re 18! Planning for a project is not a one off event. This should be an activity you and your team work through on a regular basis. Planning can be a bit dry at the best of times so my advice is to try and make it fun and involve as many of the team as you can so they all feel part of the process.
Rule 4: When a task is estimated to take longer than your gut feel would expect, get a second opinion.
As your experience as a project manager grows, you’ll begin to develop a very natural instinct to guestimate the length of time a task should take. So when you get a view that a task is going to take longer than you think is reasonable (or shorter), don’t be too quick to accept, be sure to get a second opinion.
Rule 5: Log your decisions.
If you’ve agreed a way of doing something that is pretty fundamental to the project be sure to record when you did this. Typical projects last several months and you can bet your bottom dollar that whatever you all agreed as a sensible approach in month 2 may not be remembered so well in month 6! So my advice here is to set up a very simple template so you are able to record key decisions very quickly. Also include when they were made and who made them. Keep this log in a shared area so that anyone can look at them.