- Is project management a core competence of your company?
- Are your project managers sufficiently qualified for managing projects successfully?
- Are goals and success factors of your project(s) defined and agreed?
- Do you have a structured status reporting including proper risk management?
- Are you a project manager or project leader and looking for a project management coach?
Services
- Leading a program, a project, a team in a project, or multiple projects
- Coaching project managers or project leaders
- Training project managers or project leaders
- Methodological support for projects
Description
Very often, a project is a temporary additional task to day-to-day business.
Critical success factors of projects are
- Professional project management and solid risk management
- An experienced project manager with excellent communication skills
- Full support of project sponsor and other relevant executives
In my understanding, project management means running projects in a structured and well-organized way. So-called traditional project management consists of three main phases:
- Planning the project
- Executing the project
- Completing and closing the project
The fine art of traditional project management is thoroughly planning the project, including defining the objective of the project, the scope, the timing and the resources needed. All planning results are documented in the project plan.
When executing the project, excellent communication is the most important part of project management.
Why? The project manager needs to be able to
- motivate the project team members to fulfill the assigned tasks,
- continuously understand the status of the project as well as
- identify difficulties and risks early and manage them with a proper risk management.
Thus, it is important for the project manager to communicate regularly with the project sponsor and also with all other relevant stakeholders and interest groups. When closing a project, the project manager prepares a final report to depict how the objectives have been achieved, and presents the results.
In addition to the so-called traditional project management new project management methods called agile have evolved. Agile project management is an iterative approach to planning and guiding project processes and focuses on the result to be delivered per iteration and the user acceptance.
The main benefit of agile project management is its ability to respond to issues and change requests of users as they arise throughout the course of the project and to make necessary changes at the right time. A potential disadvantage is the difficulty to manage the scope changes and thus deliver a successful project on time and within budget.