13 Basic Steps for the Project Novice:

13 Basic Steps for the Project Novice:

Define the Scope: The first, and most important, step in any project is defining the scope of the project. What is it you are supposed to accomplish or create? What is the project objective? Equally important is defining what is not included in the scope of your project. If you don't get enough definition from your boss, clarify the scope yourself and send it back upstairs for confirmation. While the example is slightly off the business topic, we can all relate to a wedding reception. In planning a wedding reception, you may have as your scope: prepare a wedding reception for 100 guests, complete with dinner, open bar, wedding cake and a live band for dancing by a certain date at a cost not to exceed $20,000.

Determine Available Resources: What people, equipment, and money will you have available to you to achieve the project objectives? As a project manager, you usually will not have direct control of these resources, but will have to manage them through matrix management.
Understand the Timeline: When does the project have to be completed? As you develop your project plan you may have some flexibility in how you use time during the project, but deadlines usually are fixed, as in the case of the wedding reception. If you decide to use overtime hours to meet the schedule, you must weigh that against the limitations of your budget.

Assemble Your Project Team: Get the people on your team together and start a dialog. They are the technical experts. That's why their functional supervisor assigned them to the project. Your job is to manage the team.

Detail the Work, Part 1: ​​What are the major pieces or components that have to be created to complete the project. For example, a wedding reception requires at a high level: a reception hall, food, drink, a cake, guests and entertainment. Of course, each of those larger items can be broken down into many additional items. That is the next step.

Detail the Work, Part 2: In our wedding reception example above, you likely have a team or person in charge of different components. Work with your team members to spell out the details necessary to achieve each major item. The person in charge of food must understand the options, the cost limitations and make selections that support achieving the scope. List the smaller steps in each of the larger steps. How many levels deep you go of more and more detailed steps depends on the size and complexity of your project.

Develop a Preliminary Plan: Assemble all your steps into a plan. A good way to do this is to use a precedence table identifying what items must precede other items. Formal project management practices call for developing what is termed a network diagram and identifying the critical path. While this may be beyond your needs or knowledge level, the core issue is to sequence the activities in the right order and then allocate resources against the activities. Questions to ask include: What happens first? What is the next step? Which steps can go on at the same time with different resources? Who is going to do each step? How long will it take? There are many excellent software packages available that can automate a lot of this detail for you. Ask others in similar positions what they use.

Create Your Baseline Plan: Get feedback on your preliminary plan from your team and from any other stakeholders. Adjust your timelines and work schedules to fit the project into the available time. Make any necessary adjustments to the preliminary plan to produce a baseline plan.

Request Project Adjustments: There is almost never enough time, money or talent assigned to a project. Your job is to do more with the limited resources than people expect. However, there are often limits placed on a project that are simply unrealistic. You need to make your case and present it to your boss and request these unrealistic limits be changed. Ask for the changes at the beginning of the project. Don't wait until it's in trouble to ask for the changes you need. However, if your project involves a wedding, do not expect to be successful asking for many significant changes!
Work Your Plan, But Don't Die For It: Making the plan is important, but the plan can be changed. You have a plan for driving to work every morning. If one intersection is blocked by an accident, you change your plan and go a different way. Do the same with your project plans. Change them as needed, but always keep the scope and resources in mind.

Monitor Your Team's Progress: You will make little progress at the beginning of the project, but start then to monitor what everyone is doing anyway. That will make it easier to catch issues before they become problems.

Document Everything: Keep records. Every time you change from your baseline plan, write down what the change was and why it was necessary. Every time a new requirement is added to the project write down where the requirement came from and how the timeline or budget was adjusted because of it. You can't remember everything, so write them down so you'll be able to look them up at the end-of-project review and learn from them.

Keep Everyone Informed: Keep all the project stakeholders informed of progress all along. Let them know of your success as you complete each milestone, but also inform them of problems as soon as they come up. Also keep you team informed. If changes are being considered, tell the team about them as far ahead as you can. Make sure everyone on the team is aware of what everyone else is doing.

The Bottom Line:

You do not have to be a formal project manager to lead a project initiative. However, you should apply the tools and logic of project management to the work of clarifying your objectives, detailing the work, building a team and executing and monitoring the work. Best of success!