5 Key Practices for Successful Project Management

Anyone who has ever worked on a project with a team knows that success depends on organization and planning.

The key to any successful project is planning. That rule applies regardless of team size – from a lone carpenter building a table, to a thousand-person construction project.

How you plan will have an enormous impact on whether you have the resources to realize your project, and the flexibility to respond to problems should they arise.

In this article, we’re going to outline the five key practices for running a successful IT development project.

1. Agree

The first step to any successful project is agreeing on the deliverables, scope, timeframe and price.

This will need to include considerations for delays, add-ons and detailed, specific descriptions on what the final outcome will need to be.

This agreement needs to be made between all stakeholders. Your IT development technicians, developers and designers should also be brought into this process, to ensure that the project is realizable according to them too.

2. Create a detailed (but flexible) plan

Once all has been agreed, it’s time to start developing a detailed technical plan. This will need to include timeframes, allocation of roles and responsibilities to the various team members, and an inventory of the resources, including software and hardware, that will be required.

At this point, it will be imperative to assign an individual to be a project leader or project owner, who will also be the point of contact if other team members run into problems, and who can also communicate the project’s status to the client.  

3. Plan for problems

This is one of the most important components of a successful project, and unfortunately it’s also the one that tends to be forgotten or disregarded most often.

We cannot overstate the importance of integrating a robust system for identifying, reporting and overcoming problems or issues that can arise within a project, as they are almost inevitable.

Consider allocating a specific team member to the role of ‘problem solver’, who can take full charge of issues so that they can be isolated and have minimal effect on the completion of other components of the project.

4. Document

Another key component of any successful project is the documentation of everything. Minutes should be taken at each meeting, outlining key points discussed, tasks assigned, and issues raised.

It will also be useful for your IT developers to document the processes that have been used to realize goals, and for your project manager to create an organized and accessible archive of a project’s documentation.

This will provide a structure to the project, and will also make it easier to solve problems at their root if and when they arise.

5. Communicate

This may seem obvious, but it is also a practice that often gets forgotten in the realm of IT development.

Communication should take place both between team members, the project manager and the client. There should be a dedicated individual assigned the role of communicating with the client, on a regular basis that can be defined according to both sides’ needs and circumstances.

This point of contact can be the project manager themselves (if they are physically found within the IT team), or ideally you will have a project owner that can fulfill that role.

Planning, launching and successfully completing an IT project might seem like a daunting task, but with the right planning and team, it can all fall into place.

Get in touch to find out how Bocasay can help you realize your development dream.