With increasing complexities and changing dynamics of the marketplace, customer’s need is evolving.
And you, as a Project Manager, need agility to adapt customers’ rapidly changing requirements while helping your development team to meet their task.
In addition to responding to customer’s feedback and demands, Project Managers have to cater to modern project development needs like- iterative roadmap, a large number of requirements documents, and a geographically distributed team.
As these challenges mount, the pressure is on you to evolve your organization’s development process and deliver the best quality products.
Clearly, continuing to communicate via unstructured methods like emails, chats, and general spreadsheets, will not help you in delivering successful projects.
Project Managers play a critical role in an organization’s overall success by planning, organizing, and managing resources to maximize the productivity and efficiency of the team. You can only deliver successful projects through effective project management practices.
In this article, we will share some most effective project management practices that can improve your project management skills and help you achieve project success.
1. Define Scope & Objectives
It is critical to have the project scope and get it approved by all the stakeholders. It is considered good practice to establish clear objectives at an early phase of the project life cycle.
You can do this by documenting all the functional and non-functional requirements that the project must complete.
Through the project scope, you will be able to answer basic questions like
- Project goals
- Deliverables
- Project constraints
- Standards of performance
2. Establish Requirements Management System
Most organization uses Requirements Management tools for planning, organizing, and managing projects. A robust requirements management tool captures all requirements and ensures traceability.
Such tools eliminate most design mistakes and reduce failure during the development process. Jira is one such popular management tool.
If you are a Jira user, you can use RMsis- Requirements Management for Jira. RMsis is a comprehensive tool that provides a centralised repository to control and monitor every task without switching to other applications. RMsis includes features like requirements baselining, version control, traceability, and reporting.
3. Requirements Baseline
Once requirements are documented, the key stakeholders must review the deliverables and must agree on project objectives, scope, timing, and resources. Baselining requirements set clear expectations between the stakeholders and the development team. It also prevents scope creep and reworks.
4. Defining Project Roadmap
Building an accurate roadmap is the most critical task of a project manager because it maps out the steps everyone will take to complete the project successfully.
The project roadmap communicates the value the project will deliver. The roadmap describes to your team the problems that the project will solve, why are you solving.
5. Effective Communication
Communication is the heart and soul of any successful project. As a project manager, you need to facilitate communication at every stage of project development. With teams working remotely and in different geographic locations, communication has become more vital than ever.
Using a centralized platform helps the team and key stakeholders to stay in sync with activities and progress. It ensures transparency in the project, thus enables the development team to collaborate and view the bigger picture.
6. Tracking & Reporting Project Progress
A sign of a good project manager is the one who consistently keeps an eye on the progress of the project. Tracking progress helps project managers to identify variations and report to the stakeholders and team for corrective action.
Thus, frequent traceability and reporting improves the quality of the project and minimizes errors and gaps.
You can use the following reports for monitoring the project progress-
- Traceability Reports– This report is used to trace end-to-end requirements both in the forward and backward direction. You can also use traceability tools like Links Explorer Traceability & Hierarchy in Jira. Links Explorer can display issues in a tree format that can help you to understand the linked-issues across projects and the relations among these issues.
- Burndown Chart– This chart alerts you with a potential bottleneck situation and allows you to identify tasks that need more effort to get back on track.
- Sprint Review– Use Sprint Review to assess against the sprint goals determined during Sprint planning.
7. Risk & Change management
Changes are inevitable in a project development cycle; hence project managers need to have a change management system. Scope creep is the biggest challenge that all project manager faces as even the smallest change request can impact a chain of requirements.
To avoid Scope creep, you can freeze the requirements during the planning phase. A good practice is to review each change request, analyze risk and feasibility before making any decision.
Now that you know these Project Management best practices, you can deliver projects in a better way. When you implement these best practices in your organization, it not only boosts your performance. But alsoenhances your team’s productivity and efficiency.
Check out RMsis and Links Explorer Traceability & Hierarchy and sign up for a free trial today.
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