Ten processes that can effectively improve project management skills

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• Schedule and process Sequence

Managers of small projects do not need to train too much project management knowledge and project management skills. However, once the project grows, these formal management processes and skills are essential for project managers. Although different project management methods organize and describe these project management processes in different ways, we still want to emphasize the most basic 10 processes:

1. Define the project scope

2. Prepare a work plan

3. Manage the work plan

4. problem management

5. Scope Management

6. Risk management

7. Communication Management

8. Document Management

9. Quality Management

10. Measure Management

In general, if you can master the knowledge of these 10 fields, you will be able to succeed in most project management. For small projects, you may not need to worry about document or measurement management. However, the more projects you manage, the more important you need to manage these 10 processes.

You may have noticed that the 10 management processes we listed do not include analysis, design, testing, or deployment. Those with some project work experience may know that a project usually involves an analysis and testing process. However, these processes are actually quite different. The analysis and testing process is part of the actual project process (also known as the project lifecycle. As the project type changes, the project lifecycle contains different stages. If your project is a project with a complete life cycle, you may perform the entire process from analysis, design, construction, testing to deployment. In other types of projects, you may only involve certain stages. For example, if your project is a research project, you will not involve deployment issues. If you are doing a research, this project may end after you finish the analysis task.

What else do we miss?

The two management processes are sometimes part of the basic project management process: personnel management, contract management, and procurement management. Personnel management is a very important skill for project managers, but it is not necessary for project management. After all, personnel management is required in any lower-level management. The difference is that personnel management is a skill required by the project "manager", rather than a skill required by the project "management.

Contract and procurement management are not included in our 10 project management process lists. In most organizations, project managers need to understand contract and supplier management, but they are not responsible for this. Legal Departments and/or procurement departments are generally responsible for the management of contracts and suppliers.

Schedule and process Sequence

In addition to the first and second categories-defining the scope of the project and preparing the work plan-these 10 main project management areas are not a sequential execution process. From process 3 to process 10, you can execute in any order. In fact, they are parallel throughout the project, and they are ongoing from the beginning of the project to the end of the project. For example, if a project has an important problem, you must ignore other processes of project management that you used before, during, or after the problem occurs, and immediately use the problem management process. Let's take a closer look at every management process.

1. Define the project scope

As a project manager, you must determine the work of the project before the project starts. This is easy to understand and has been approved by the project sponsor and key project stakeholders. You need to discuss these tasks with the initiator and project stakeholders, to ensure that the project team and the customer understand the deliverables of the project, the project completion time, the project cost, the project execution team, the project completion method, and the final benefits.

From the perspective of the project management, the purpose of defining the project work includes:

-- Understand the project objectives, deliverables, scope, risks, costs, and methods, and reach an agreement. This is the most important part of defining a project, and most of the time is spent on reaching an agreement.

-- Determine whether the initial business case is still correct. For example, a project that requires 10 thousand yuan of work may have commercial significance. However, if the process of defining the work is too detailed, it will lead to more than 20 thousand hours of accurate estimation time, so that this project may no longer be feasible.

-- Make sure that the resources you need are available when you need them.

-- Create a high-level project baseline. Depending on this baseline, the project personnel can compare the implementation of each process or control the scope of the project.

-- Reach an agreement with the customer regarding the management process used by the project.

The amount of effort required to define a project depends on the amount of information required for project-related personnel to understand and document. The time required to work on the definition project depends on the time required to understand and document the information, and on the time required to obtain the customer's consent and approval.

For large and complex projects, it may be very difficult to accurately define the final deliverables. It is also difficult to estimate the total cost of the project and the final delivery date. If you manage large and complex projects, you can divide the entire project into several small projects. In these small projects, the small projects that need to be done first should be easier to define their work. For small projects that need to be completed in the future, you can define the work in detail during fast execution.

When defining the project scope, you should formulate a project definition. This document defines all expectations of the project in terms of project objectives, deliverables, scope, risks, delivery dates, and project personnel roles. This document should be officially approved by the project sponsor and other key stakeholders before the project team starts executing the project.

2. Prepare a work plan

When defining a project, make sure that you agree with the project sponsor on all the work content that the project should complete. At this stage of preparing a work plan, you will determine how to complete the work. This requires the establishment of the project plan. Depending on the project size, you need to adopt different methods. For example, you can use a project management toolkit, spreadsheet software, or even a piece of paper to prepare a work plan for a small project.

If you do not have a Work Plan Template available when you start planning, you can use the work breakdown structure (WBS ). WBS is a technology that breaks down the work from the high-level level of the project into smaller and smaller parts until the project manager obtains a complete view of the project work. The entire project team should work together on this basis. I recommend that you break down your work to a lower level. It takes no more than 80 hours to complete each activity that is no longer decomposed, and the resources required to complete the activity are clear.

Once you break down all your work into activities, you can sort these activities in order and determine their dependencies. In this case, WBS is transformed into a network diagram ).

Then, you need to add resources (staff) for each activity ). If you know the exact names of some resources, you can add them by name. If you do not know, you can use a common name to hold a space. Next, you need to add work hours, start dates, and end dates for each activity.

Now, your work plan is ready. You can clearly understand what you want to do (project definition) and how you want to do it (Project Plan).

Relationship between project definition and project plan

You will find that if you do not start to arrange the entire project plan, you cannot define the project definition completely. In many cases, you need to synchronize the Two deliverables. When you collect information about the scope and deliverables, you need to create a schedule to get an estimate of the time and duration. When you define deliverables, scopes, assumptions, and methods clearly, you will get enough information to develop the project plan to estimate the budget, work hours, and duration. Then, you can use them to complete the project definition.

3. Manage plans

At this time, you have completed the project definition and project plan. The main deliverables, project definition and project plan, are ready. Some project managers believe that the most difficult part of project management is to complete the project definition and project plan. This is obviously not the case.

If you cannot continuously update the project plan, you will never become a successful project manager. Remember, a project plan is just a deliverable. The project plan describes the work to be completed, the sequence of work, the required work hours, and the owner. However, the project plan is only the best prediction of how to complete the remaining work at a specific time point of the project.

The more complex your project is, the more places your project plans need to be updated as time passes. As a project manager, you must evaluate the project plan on a constantly changing basis (maybe once a week) to determine the current situation of the project.

In the Weekly Review, you need to update the current status of completed and ongoing work in the Project Plan. You need to evaluate the remaining work to see if the project can be completed based on the estimated work hours, cost, and duration in the initial plan. If the evaluation result is that the project can be completed according to the initial plan, your project is in good status currently. Otherwise, you must take corrective actions.

Among all the skills for managing projects, managing a work plan may be the most basic one. Depending on the actual situation of the project, you may have to keep using your experience and creativity to complete the project as expected. Your project may be on schedule this week. Next week, you may encounter task delays and other problems.

If an activity on a critical path has been extended for a week, you cannot sit down and watch the entire project be extended for a week. On the contrary, you must evaluate available resources and possible options to make the project back on track. If you are good at managing a work plan, it will be one of the most challenging and reporting tasks in project management. If you do not like the necessary meticulous work, you will find it too difficult to succeed.

4. problem management

When a problem hinders project execution, a "problem" occurs. Without external help, the project manager and the project team cannot solve the "problem ". If there is a serious problem, you have no choice but to solve it. The only problem is whether you can actively use problem management to overcome the difficulties of indecisive and uncertain how to solve the problem.

Problem management consists of two important parts. First, you must go through a process to investigate the problem, determine the impact of the problem on the project, consider the optional solutions, and lead the team to make the best decision in this case. All these project management steps should be defined in advance and agreed. These steps ensure that the problem can be resolved as quickly as possible.

The second part of problem management is to use specific problem solving skills. This includes some of the skills we are familiar with, such as the fish bone chart (fishbone diagrams), the histogram (Rochelle charts), and root cause analysis. You may be familiar with one or more of these skills, they allow you and your team to understand the nature and cause of the problem, what feasible solutions are available, and which solution is the best choice.

A very important fact that all project managers recognize is that there is a process to solve the problem, but this does not mean that you will successfully solve each problem. Sometimes, there are many ways to solve the problem. Your job is to help find out which one is the best. Sometimes, there is no good solution to a major problem. At this time, your best choice is to pick out a solution, this solution has the least harm or is the best among other worse solutions. Even so, the problem solving process and problem solving skills will help you determine which options are available, so that you can at least understand what the consequences are.

5. Scope Management

Project Scope describes the project boundaries, defines the content of project delivery, required data, and affected organizations. Given a group of resources and time, you can deliver unlimited things.

Scope change management begins with scope Change definition. If the project manager does not define the scope, it is very difficult to manage the scope during project execution. Scope change management aims to protect the feasibility of the currently approved project definition. Once a project is defined, a certain expectation for the project is set, resulting in a corresponding cost and schedule. When the project definition is submitted and approved on time, you and the project initiator will keep these expectations in mind.

Some requirements may be different from or not included in the initial project definition during project execution. This situation is foreseeable. If this happens, the customer should not expect these requirements to be delivered under the previously recognized resource and time constraints. If you need to include new requirements in the project definition, the project team should analyze these new requirements and determine their impact on the project. The information is then approved by the project sponsor.

Remember, the project initiator is the person who approves the project launch fund. Therefore, he or she should also be the person who approves any project definition change. If the business value of the change is high enough, the initiator should approve the addition of these new requirements to the project, and increase the budget and time required to complete the work. Then, everyone should agree and reset the project expectations.

Of course, sometimes the situation is not so smooth. Generally, the following problems occur:

Out of range:Large-scale scope changes are easy to see. However, when the changes are very small, you may find that you have included the changes into the project before you understand them. "Out of scope" means that you have accepted small changes, and the small changes gradually accumulate results in a significant impact on the project. You and your entire team must be careful with changes to the project scope, whether large or small.

End user's acceptance of the scope:The project initiator pays for the project. However, once the project starts, the project team will spend more time on grass-roots customers and end users. Some project team members believe that the end user can approve the scope change. This is not the case. The initiators do not have permission to approve the change of scope unless they have explicitly granted the approval permission to the end users. They can make a request for a change in scope, but only those who have the permission to initiate the change can approve the increase.

Team members do not understand their responsibilities:One common cause of failure to complete the project on schedule is that the project team members eventually do more work than they actually need. For example, a team member is required to complete a report. When he or she is writing a report, the customer asks for new content. The team members tried to satisfy the customer, so the work was eventually extended. This usually happens when the team members think that only the project manager needs to worry about scope changes. Team members must understand that scope change control is the responsibility of everyone.

The root cause for the failure of many unsuccessful projects is that their scope change control is poor. Effectively defining and managing the scope will increase your project's chances of meeting expectations.

6. Risk management

Risks refer to situations or environments that are not under the control of the project team or that will adversely affect the project if they occur. In other words, the problem is the current trouble that must be addressed, and the risk is a potential trouble. The passive Project Manager solves the problem when the problem occurs. Proactively identifies and solves potential problems before a problem occurs. Risk management is both scientific and artistic.

Because small projects usually have a short cycle, there is little possibility of problems. Large projects usually have hidden risks. Risk management includes identifying the potential risks of all projects, determining the likelihood of their occurrence, and clearly understanding the impact on the project if they occur.

Based on this information, the project team can determine which risks need to be actively managed. For example, you must take the initiative to manage the risks with high probability and great impact on the project, and ignore the risks with high probability but little impact on the project.

Once you identify the risks that require proactive management, you can use the following five common practices:

Leave it alone.If you think that a certain risk has little impact on your project, or there is no way to eliminate it, or you are willing to gamble on a certain risk, you should leave it alone.

Monitoring risks.In this case, you do not need to take the initiative to reduce the risk, but you need to monitor it to see if it is more likely to happen over time. If the possibility of a risk increases later, the team must find a way to eliminate it.

Avoid Risks.Avoiding Risks means eliminating the conditions that may cause troubles. For example, risks related to a specific supplier may be avoided after other suppliers are selected.

Transfer risk.In some cases, the responsibility for managing risks may be transferred from the project team to other entities or third-party organizations.

Reduce risks.This should be done in most cases. If you have identified a risk or are worried about a risk, you should develop an active plan to ensure that it does not happen.

Just like a range change, a project cannot be at risk. The customer does not expect a project to be risk-free. The problem is the response of project management to risks. If risk identification is performed and risks are actively managed, the project is more likely to succeed. If possible risks are ignored, the project can only be passively affected when the risks change to problems. At this time, there may be only a few solutions to avoid project impact.

7. Communication Management

Proper communication is essential for managing customers and stakeholders in projects. If customers and stakeholders do not know the progress of the project in a timely manner, their different expectations for the project may increase the possibility of project problems and difficulties. In fact, in many cases, conflicts do not occur because of actual problems, but because customers and managers are unaware of them.

There are two levels of communication in the project. First, all projects should be communicated. Second, if your project is bigger, more complex, or politically related, the communication you want is usually more advanced and complex. Therefore, you need to develop a communication plan.

Project status meeting and project status report

All projects need effective communication, from the project team to the Project Manager, from the project manager to other stakeholders. Project status reports and project status meetings are not only used to report the normal progress of the project, but also have other things to do. From the project status report and project status meeting, you can learn everything you need to know about the project. You must stick to the concept of the project budget and schedule, communicate the work planned to be completed in the last reporting period, and communicate the work planned to be completed in the next reporting period, new risks, and current problems, and the current request for Scope change.

Both the information and the speech must be considered by your audience. Therefore, you 'd better hold a weekly project status meeting with your project team, which should include some very detailed discussions. The status reports you send to the initiators and management stakeholders must be brief and highly summarized.

Communication Plan

Major decisions, especially those that require organizational changes, must include a comprehensive communication plan that will adopt multiple communication methods. The process of preparing a communication plan includes identifying all stakeholders, determining the project information they need to obtain, brainstorming the distribution of information, and maximizing the project benefits when resources are fully utilized. communicate with stakeholders.

One of the following three methods is generally used for communication based on the listener's situation:

Mandatory:Includes the project status report, project budget report, and approved requirements.

Reference:Provide further information to relevant personnel. For example, the document library, FAQ list, and the project site that contains the relevant project information.

Marketing:This type of communication aims to enhance everyone's enthusiasm for the project. For example, publish successful project experiences, establish a positive image, distribute management recommendations, and use the Project logo.

The project manager must take the initiative to control the communication activities and consciously plan and execute the communication activities. If your communication behavior is both effective and active, you will find that the entire project operates more smoothly and has fewer conflicts and obstacles.

8. Document Management

Many project managers believe that document management is required only when there are several hundred documents in the project. In fact, a better way is to estimate in advance the number of documents that you think the project itself and project management may produce, and establish a set of appropriate processes and rules to organize documents, in addition, documents are managed during the project to ensure that documents are not out of control.

Project managers in small projects do not need to consider document management too much. As the project grows, the project manager must take the initiative to manage documents in the project. The most common problem you may encounter when managing a document is that the document is lost or hard to find, so you have to write it again at the end of the project. The worst case is that the document version is out of control, and the update date of the document is expired, lost, confused, or uncertain.

Document management is an aspect of project management. You can use tools such as document libraries. However, if appropriate technologies are not used to store documents and documents cannot be easily accessed, the use of tools can only make the problem more complex.

Document management is simple and complex. Simple tasks include naming conventions. If you have 10 members in your team and each person submits a status report every week, you will soon have hundreds of documents. If everyone uses a general naming convention, it is easy to organize documents. Should the document name start with everyone's name? In this case, the historical status reports of each person are arranged together and can be easily found.

You may want to find the status report at a specific time point. In this case, the status report should start with time. In this way, all the status reports are arranged together according to the report cycle.

Another aspect of document management is to define the document management tools used by the project. For example, you may use Microsoft Word as a standard document editor. If your project team is cross-functional, including customers, vendors, and suppliers, document management rules are more important.

To make document management successful, some other factors must also be considered. For example, the location where a document is stored, the document's organization method, access and security rules, keywords or indexes, naming criteria, version control, completion status, retention or destruction status, backup, and standard templates.

9. Quality Management

The degree to which projects and deliverables meet customer needs and expectations reflects the quality. In other words, the customer determines the quality.

The project team should strive to meet or even exceed the customer's needs and expectations. Sometimes, you may think that high quality means the best materials and equipment with zero defects. However, in most cases, customers do not expect and cannot afford such a perfect solution. If the project only has some defects, the customer will still think that the delivered project is of high quality.

In other words, if a solution is perfectly designed and has no defect, but does not meet the customer's needs, it is not a high-quality solution. From the perspective of quality, quality management aims to first understand the expectations of customers. Then, plan and manage the process to meet or even exceed the expectations of the customer.

Because the quality level is determined by the customer, the judgment criteria seem quite subjective. However, quality can also be judged objectively. First, we need to break down the term "quality" into some customizable quality features.

For example, you may think that the quality of computer software should be measured by response time, user experience, ease of use, help documentation, and defects. Once you define quantifiable quality features, you can determine whether they can objectively measure quality.

Quality management is not a single event: it is a process, a way of thinking. Consistently high-quality products cannot produce their own defects. You need to establish a weighted quality first, and then improve the repeating cycle of the process.

To make the quality management process work normally, it is very important to collect measurements. Therefore, the Ninth and Tenth aspects of project management are closely related to quality management and measurement management. If you want to do a good job in quality management, you must measure.

Once the project has completed the initial definition, the project team must understand the customer's expectations as required by quality and develop a quality plan to meet these expectations. The quality plan should contain complete and correct key domains so that the project team can understand the customer's expectations for quality.

The quality plan also includes two common quality management processes: quality control and quality assurance. Quality control activities ensure that deliverables submitted by the project meet the customer's expectations. For example, check each component used to complete the final deliverables. Quality assurance activities ensure that the process used to create deliverables is of high quality. For example, before final submission of deliverables, use the checklist to check whether all required steps have been completed.

One of the purposes of quality management is to detect errors or defects in the project as soon as possible. Therefore, a good quality management process will allow the project to spend more time and cost. However, if you focus on quality in the early stages of the project, it will bring a huge return to the project. For example, the analysis phase of a project finds problems related to business needs much more efficient than missing requirements found during project testing. For example, when manufacturing a computer chip, it is found that the problem with the chip is much lower than the cost of replacing the chip with the computer after the customer buys it.

10. Measure Management

Collecting Metrics is the most complex and possibly the most difficult project management process. Measurements are difficult to define and collect, so they are often ignored or processed slightly. All projects should collect basic metrics, such as cost, working hours, and weeks. However, you must also collect metrics that determine whether deliverables meet the customer's expectations, and those that determine whether the internal operation of the project is normal. Once you decide what kind of capacity you need, you can start the corresponding action or process improvement behavior, which can make the collection process more efficient.

Measurement management and quality management are related. If you do not collect these measurements, it is difficult to improve the quality of deliverables or execution processes. Measurements are usually used to indicate the initial state of quality and whether the quality is improved or decreased.

Many Metrics can be collected in projects. The project team should define and organize a balanced set that provides maximum value. To determine which metrics are suitable for your project, you can:

Identifies criteria for determining whether the project is successful Based on deliverables and project implementation of the project. That is to say, determine what your deliverables should look like when the project is successfully completed. You also need to determine some things that must be considered for project success, such as the budget and delivery date.

Organize teams to brainstorm and collect every metric that indicates project success.

Find a set of metrics that can judge project success by cost, delivery, quality, and customer satisfaction.

Prioritize potential metrics that provide maximum value in the most economical way.

Set the target that can make you succeed. Measurements rarely generate value independently. Its value lies in its ability to measure whether you deviate from your goal.

Add collection activities in the work plan to ensure that someone is responsible for Metric Collection and analysis.

Generally, measurement management is of little value to small projects because small projects usually do not have enough time to capture the data, analyze the results, and make appropriate improvements. A project that lasts for a long time gives you the time to use the feedback loop. If you use a measurement to improve an organizational unit, you can use the measurement to obtain the maximum value.

 

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