Project Agency reveals key tips on successful project management
Project management training and development specialist, Project Agency, has set out its four-step criteria for successful projects.
These criteria - amplified in the company's training courses, including its recently published e-learning materials - provide a strategic framework while its courses and e-learning materials enable those involved in a project to:
• use a standardised framework for defining, planning and controlling projects
• recognise the role(s) they play and define other people's contribution to the project management process
• recognise and reduce risks within all types of project work and
• use a range of tools related to project management
The Project Agency's four-step criteria for successful projects are:
Identify the business case:
- How does the project fit with your strategy? And, if it doesn't, why do it?
- What are the benefits of delivering this project?
- What are the costs? And are they worth it?
Define the project
- Clarify roles: identify the project manager and project's sponsor (a senior manager)
- Develop clear, measurable objectives - including defining the project's scope and criteria for success
- Identify and manage stakeholders - including 'selling' the project to them if necessary
- Define the skills needed by the project team
- Identify ideal members of the project team
- Produce a development plan and then train those whose skills are lacking
- Devise a risk log (charting the risk management issues involved in the project)
- Develop the plan
- Split the project into its component parts
- Be realistic - not optimistic - about what can be achieved, given the resources available
- Produce charts that show the relationship between activities and durations
- Agree a reporting structure: agree who reports to whom, about what and at what intervals
- Agree a process by which any changes to the project can be discussed and agreed
- Compare actual with planned progress
Closing the project
- Agree a closing date for the project. This acts as a great motivator
- Review the project and learn the lessons it would teach you
- Reward the project team for their success
Learn the lessons that the project has taught you
Ron Rosenhead, chief executive of Project Agency, explained: "Of course, there's more to a project than merely doing it and completing it. At the end, there are many lessons to learn.
"For example, what went well - and what didn't? How could things have been done more effectively and/or efficiently?" he said.
"For many years we've been helping people to deliver projects effectively and with a high degree of success," he added. "Recently, we made a lot of our expertise available online - in the form of e-learning materials - because we realised that, these days there are many advantages to this form of learning delivery.
"E-learning is available '24/7' and so can be undertaken whenever the learner is able to do it; it's flexible; it can be undertaken almost anywhere at any time; it can be done at the learner's own pace, and, in these economically challenging times, it can reduce the travel and subsistence costs associated with formal training.
"Our e-learning materials introduce the learner to a project management approach that is used throughout the UK and Europe," Rosenhead said. "They combine reading material, activities (with model answers), audio commentary, video, on-screen guidance and assessments."
Further details of The Perfect Project E-learning Course are available from http://projectagency.co.uk/elearning and http://projectagency.co.uk/faqs-elearning, as well as from +44 (0)20 8446 7766. To access the course, visit the Project Agency learning portal http://learning.projectagency.co.uk
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