Understanding Project Management
Project management is a very simple concept to understand yet most people have a very hard time with it. The key to a project is having a goal, a plan on how to get to that goal, along a job list. This article will go over some basic concepts that will help you understand those concepts. As on a prince 2 London and practitioner training.
The most basic concept we will cover, in terms of project management, is the breaking down of a project into small, doable units. Usually, a project is broken down into phases affecting one or two larger projects. The main goal of a project manager is to make sure that each smaller project phase is completed in the allotted time frame.
Assigning Time and Dates to Phases of a Project
Let’s say you have broken your project goal down into small units; the first project you need to plan is “Project Basic”. This project will be broken down into three tasks, national, regional, and state. These three tasks are what will be in the plan at the start. Each one of these tasks will have a lead time, lead person, and reporting dates to it. A lead time will let you know if the phase of the project is booked solid or has tight deadlines, so as to accommodate your timetable. A lead person will be assigned to each task of the project. This will allow you to know to whom you are requesting the work.
These two project elements will have other parts of a project due to due to the fact that they are being placed within that area of the smaller project. You will also head off any confusion in your job portfolio, keep your job cut down to 50 pieces or less.
Here is an example of a good time and date sheet and report. You can adjust the time and dates to reflect your daily schedule and direct your team to do the same. Doing this every time you break down a project will help you do that over and over again.
Your job now shifts from simple time and date tracking to project, complete a task, head of the confusion, and the journalism of your time and place sheet. Apply these general principles and project management process to your next project, and think of your next projects as an editor, as you break it down you are generalizing your thoughts to make them interesting and logical.
Also, consider the bigger picture. Even though you only have three tasks which were broken down into three phases, look at the overall picture. When a task needs to be broken down you can ask yourself, “What is the larger more important picture?” Where is this one project on its way to reaching the next one? Which other things in the project could save a less important task? In this example, the reason for the sampling phase was so that it would be easier to assemble all the smaller projects into one collection in a single slot.
All and all this project management stuff is really simple and pretty easy once you make a plan, stick with your plan and add in time horizons consistently. Now you find you have your project split down into manageable pieces, that will make your life easier if you stop each week of managing. As you finish tasks under each phase then you can start the next one, most likely you will fall back into the general itinerary and go back to all the basic concepts you had on hand. At this point, you are marking the completed phases as active by being able to manage your time constructively. You have seen your “walking to effective projects” now your “effective projects slow-walking” is on the way.
