7 Project Management Tips for Successful Project Delivery

Elena Humeniuk

PPM Consultant

Every project manager’s job is to keep the project delivery train on the right track. Why is this important? Statistics from the Project Management Institute show that 14 percent of projects fail. Out of those that recorded success, nearly 50 percent were not completed on time. And it gets worse. More than 42 percent exceeded their budgets, and 32 percent delivered an outcome that did not meet expectations. This is not what you want. You need better insight into project deadlines, budgets, and deliverables. Then, craft a well-tailored, all-encompassing project plan to produce and help you achieve the desired outcomes. If you’re wondering what project delivery is, it entails carefully planning, performing, and completing a project. Proactive preparation is key. A good project manager strives to identify, mitigate, or avoid pitfalls. This article provides seven project management tips you can adapt as part of your PPM initiatives. These project tips are the results of tried and tested solutions based on previous experiences and fundamental lessons in project delivery.

1. Develop the project scope statement

All projects have deliverables included or excluded from them, and a scope statement is a document that lists such deliverables. The scope statement is important because you can leverage it to define deliverables, negotiate objectives, and clarify assumptions. You might be tempted to skip creating this document because the outcome looks obvious, but don’t. Preparing the scope statement and further vetting it with stakeholders will minimize surprises during the project execution phase. It should form part of your project delivery plan because it helps to ascertain project boundaries, limits, and exclusions in project management.

Find out top 10 team management skills

Read now

The following should form part of your scope statement:

• Project objectives
• Project deliverables
• Milestones
• Key requirements
• Exclusions and limits

2. Conduct a stakeholder analysis

Stakeholder analysis is a good technique used in project delivery management to evaluate certain people’s influence and expectations about a project. Do not assume that all stakeholders at a given executive or management level will share the same interests or have similar communication needs or power. Some stakeholders may possess high-level authority with significant interest and influence, while others may possess low-level power with less impact on the project.

You might miscommunicate if you fail to understand what stakeholders need and what level of power and influence they wield within the organization. You must maintain a list of high-level power and high-interest stakeholders to keep them well-informed and avoid getting “supporting feedback.” Conducting a stakeholder analysis will inform you of various powers, interests, and communication needs and prevent communication problems.

3. Create and communicate your project plan

One of the most important tips for project management is to craft and communicate your project plan. The project delivery plan is a document that outlines the project management procedure used to control and execute the project. With this plan, you can explain important project management expectations and how the project will run overall. Some enterprises even go to great lengths to write project plans that comply with ISO 21500 Standards. This formal project delivery plan is all-encompassing and adds value to your existing project team.

You can draft your project management plan as a PowerPoint document, which is easy to read, apply, and reuse anytime.

4. Reevaluate your project work breakdown structure (WBS)

One of the keys to successful project delivery is to utilize a graphic WBS. When in a visual format, the WBS enables project managers to break down their projects into smaller deliverables they can add to their project schedule.

Your project team might decide to jump straight into scheduling, which is fine if the project size is smaller in scale. But if you’re dealing with large-scale and more complex projects, you need to create a WBS to help identify and manage the key project workflows that need to be tracked and reported on in the project’s status. For example, you can print and post a selected high-level WBS on your office wall or board as a reminder of what must be delivered regarding the project’s overall scope.

5. Track actions, issues, and risks

Tracking, managing, and maintaining a project’s actions, risks, and issues can be challenging. Have you ever spent two hours or more reviewing a project issue log in a meeting that was supposed to last 30 minutes? This is one of the many daily administrative challenges project managers face, mainly due to current issues and risk management habits. Develop a habit of writing down your project actions, issues, and associated risks weekly, and you will not forget anything important that needs attention.

There are different formats for implementing these logs. They include shared document repositories, online-based project management systems, and spreadsheet templates. Preferably, you can keep track of these actions, issues, and risks using a collaborative tool. This will also allow other team members to manage these logs.

6. Manage your meeting minutes

Taking notes during meetings can sometimes drag on administrative endeavors, but they’re useful for creating and maintaining effective meeting summaries. They help identify follow-up actions and promote accountability. You may not take notes during every meeting, but it’s good to document them during essential meetings where critical decisions are made and follow-up actions are needed.

Two project tips for managing your meeting minutes: use a mind map or copy the specific follow-up actions directly from the action log. This will save you the stress of typing the minutes twice. In addition, there is free meeting software available online that you can use to generate notes and actions automatically for your meetings. This will simplify your project management delivery initiatives.

7. Update your project schedule and review the crucial path

As a project manager, you know how vital the project schedule is to your project delivery management efforts. Also, you have probably read or heard about the critical path. Of course, with a project schedule, you can forecast end dates and calculate the critical path using a forward and backward pass, but there is more to it than just having a project schedule. It needs to be updated regularly.

Some project managers have missed critical weeks of updating their project schedule based on the assumption that they’re on track. As a result, they have other project managers and teams submit schedules that are not current. Due to the workload being too significant, many project managers quickly forget the essential administrative tasks for successful project management and delivery. You can do better today with the right project delivery plan.

Choose a time for your update

First, get your calendar and schedule an hour for performing an administrative update. You will have less administration to worry about if you leverage a third-party tool, allowing your project team to update the schedule while working on assigned tasks. However, suppose you’re not using a collaborative scheduling tool. In that case, you must manually track and update the schedule, a time-consuming process fraught with human error.

Check for possible missed tasks

Once you have succeeded in updating the schedule, review the critical path to see if you have missed out on any vital task directly linked to a project completion date or key milestone. There are several online tools with critical path highlighting functionality that you can use to identify the critical path. If you’re wondering what the critical path is, it is a sequence of tasks forming the longest path within the project schedule. If your critical path records a one-day slip in activities, your project will also experience a one-day slip.

Final thoughts

To sum up all the project management tips, remember that proactive planning is key to successful project delivery. These seven lessons are tips for project management that organizations can adopt to ensure success in project delivery. In addition, always ensure that project goals and objectives are clearly defined from the start. Develop a detailed project plan with clear-cut roles for everyone involved. Lastly, communicate and manage risk effectively, and never forget to monitor and adjust operations as needed.