
Project Management Software for Dummies
The title of this article itself indicates that anybody can do project management. So what is project management and how can anybody do it. Project management is the discipline of initiating, planning, executing, controlling, and closing the work of a team to achieve specific goals and meet specific success criteria.
A project could mean anything beginning from cooking an exotic dish to large turnkey engineering projects. Every project needs perfect planning, execution, and co-ordination amongst the participating members.
Because of the ever-growing array of huge, complex, and technically challenging projects in today’s world, project management has become a critical skill. People need special tools, techniques, and knowledge to handle their project management assignments.
This article covers some simple tricks for lay people to master the art of project management.
Tips to Learn the Basics of Project Management
Given below are some of the tips that will help people learn the basics of project management.
Justifying the Project
A key requirement for project management success is knowing why the project was created in the first place. In addition to helping ensure that the appropriate objectives and desired results are framed at the outset, this knowledge energizes project team members and fuels their commitment to achieve those objectives and results. Some of the basic steps to follow here are:
- Identifying the people who drive the project and determining their needs and expectations.
- Looking for existing statements that confirm the project’s support of the organization’s priorities.
- Finding several sources for the same piece of information and whenever possible getting the information from primary sources.
Developing Meaningful Project Objectives
As a project manager, developing concise and unambiguous project objectives increases the chances of successfully accomplishing them. The following pointers ensure that the project objectives are crystal clear:
- Focussing on outcomes rather than activities and making sure the objectives are SMART (specific, measurable, aggressive, realistic, and time-sensitive).
- Using clear language without any technical jargon or acronyms.
- Making sure every objective has at least one measure and every measure has at least one performance target.
Developing Achievable Project Schedules
Producing the project’s results on schedule is an essential requirement for its success. For this a project schedule needs to be developed that is achievable, responsive to the client’s needs, and understood and supported by all project team members. The following steps help to create a realistic and attainable project schedule:
- Identifying all required activities.
- Breaking down activities into sufficient detail.
- Considering both duration and interdependencies to develop the project schedule.
- Identifying the strategy for performing each activity before estimating its duration.
- Factoring in the availability of resources.
- Recognizing and writing down all assumptions related to the project and its schedule.
- Identifying and planning for all significant project schedule risks.
- Re-examining and revising the original schedule after the project is approved and work commences.
- Involving the project drivers and supporters in developing the schedule.
If you are new to project management, there is no reason to panic. With a calm mind try and understand the tools, methodologies, guidelines which that would help you on your way so as to develop the essential skills of project management.
The Project Planning Pro App is used by many large corporates and start-ups for multiple industrial domains.
Project Planning Pro is cost-effective, easy-to-use and is coming up with project management techniques based on the Agile Methodology. It is a cross platform application and is available in around 9 languages. It provides user friendly features that include:
- Creation of multiple tasks giving one’s to-do list a better structural approach.
- Reminders that notify the managers about the upcoming deadlines and the milestones to be achieved.
The Project Planning Pro App is a multi-location application and is used by many industry people across the globe. This application can be efficiently used by individuals to manage their personal to-do list, and also by project managers to track the following:
- Projects assigned to the team members
- Project deadlines
- Important project milestones to be achieved.
This application helps the project managers to deliver the right product at the right time.