Successful Outlook Project Management Tips

I wanted to put together a list of the top 10 items that I think will help you to complete your projects successfully and on-time. This list is something I put together from my 19 years experience in a wide variety of situations and projects working in the Information Technology field. I believe these tips to be transferable to a number of different industries.

1. Know what the goal of your project is.

This tip might seem somewhat redundant to you, but it is meant to cause you to consider, what the complete point of your project is. For example, a few weeks ago, I had to replace the roof on my tool shed. This was the obvious goal of my project; to stop water from destroying the items I have in my tool shed. A part of this project was to involve my children as it was an opportunity for me to spend more time with them. Knowing this and clarifying it before hand allowed me to put the project into a different perspective. Were I only considering replacing the roof, I wouldn’t have given the requisite amount of time and patience to my kids.

2. Know who is on your project team.

This tip is critical, you need to know who you have working for you. If you don’t, well I think it is pretty obvious you won’t get much complete. I like to make a list of contact information for all of the people that I have working on a project and the easiest way to get a hold of them. In today’s electronic and distributed world, email might be best, Skype is an option and even texting can work too!

3. Know the availability of your project team.

This one is a bit more subtle but is equally important as tip #2. You need to have a clear understanding of how much time your project team can commit to your project. For example if you are building a new web-site and your web designer can only commit 2 hours per day to your project. You, as the project manager, need to know this. It is the only way that you can allocate time and commit to deadlines. If you don’t know this, you are destined to fail.

4. Know what is happening to your project team.

I consider this tip to be one of the more soft-skills that is required of a project manager. In essence, you need to communicate with your team but not just with project goals, tasks and deadlines. You need to talk with them and find out what is happening in their lives. This can sometimes be one of the most challenging aspects of a project, talking with your project team, finding out if someone is; getting married, divorced, having a baby, going through a break up. All of these things affect your teams focus and concentration and if you have this information, then you can plan for it. As I mentioned this is a difficult and challenging skill to master and I consider it clearly under the umbrella of a soft-skills for a project manager.

5. Know when you project is due.

Coming from an IT world, this tip is typically one of the most important. You need to have a definitive answer for when your project is due, if you are releasing a new web-site and have coordinated a massive marketing and sales plan against it, that date is going to be set in stone. Knowing when something has to be delivered is paramount in ensuring that you can meet that goal.

6. Don’t forget the outside world.

If anything about what has happened in the world economy in the last 9 months hasn’t convinced you, sometimes there are things that happen that are bigger than all of us. Keeping up to date and current with world and local events, will help you to understand the focus and direction of your team.

7. Know who is doing what.

This tip is meant to ensure that you keep track of what tasks you have distributed to your team. You need to know who on your team is doing what for you. If you don’t keep track of this tip, then it will be easier for your project to go “off the rails”. Don’t be embarrassed to ask what a team member is doing. Ultimately you are responsible for the successful completion of the project and to do that, you need to know what is happening.

8. Have regularly scheduled meetings with agendas.

This tip refers to a key component of any project, communication. Communication is paramount on most projects; people need to know what is happening and how things are moving forward on the project. You need to ensure that meetings occur regularly to inform and educate your project team about what is happening with the project. The key point to this tip though is the “with agendas” portion of the tip. You need to ensure that your meetings have an agenda and most important a facilitator. The facilitator is responsible for following the agenda and ensuring that the meeting remains productive.

9. Watch for politics, politics, politics.

Unfortunately politics rears it ugly head in virtually all projects. If you follow all of the other tips, this one alone can and has killed projects in the past. I can seriously say that politics has affected virtually every project I have worked on. As a project manager you need to have a sense for the politics that is affecting your team and you need to do your best to insulate your team from those politics. Combating the politics that exist in every organization is a challenge and walking the mine-field that exists can make any project manager cringe, but it is critical that you, as a project manager, do you best to not engage the politics and keep your project moving forward.

10. Don’t forget to have fun.

As your project moves along and those oh so important dates from tip #5 start getting closer, don’t forget to allow your team to blow off some steam; this includes you! You need to schedule some downtime and something ideally that the team can do as a group; some good ideas that I have been a part of include; paintball, go-kart racing (that was my favourite), white water rafting (the scariest) and something as simple as a lunch out or a drink after work can and will all help your team to grow and work together.

I hope you find some value in my list of tips. I’ve tried to put the list together so that it will help both newer project managers and my more experienced colleagues along the way.

Kevin Moore

PS. If you have any comments about my list, I’d appreciate any feedback you can give to: Kevin at MissingLinkProjectCenter dot com. I hope you’ll forgive my rather cryptic email address, I wrote it that way to discourage any nasty spammer bots from scanning this article and in turn sending me a bunch of unwanted spam. Cheers!