How to Manage a Project

Everyone manages projects, both at home and at work. Managing a project successfully is similar to being the conductor of an orchestra - you have to make sure all the different threads tie together and make beautiful music. The steps below give you some good pointers to doing that.

Things You'll Need

• a goal, mission or charter
• budget tracking tools
• schedule management tools

Instructions

1. Make sure you have a clearly articulated goal that your project is to accomplish. This can be a complex goal, like building a new luxury apartment building, or a simple goal, like repainting your house. In either case, knowing the exact criteria for success will be key to your success - it may not be enough to paint your house, it has to be painted a specific color. Most likely your project has a customer - the apartment building has a group of investors to answer to, a spouse may have a vested interest in the house painting project. Make sure you get total buyin on the goals as you understand them before starting.

2. The next step is working out a budget and schedule to support the goals. Your customer may well have a specific cost in mind for the project, and a date it should be done by. If (in the course of investigating the goals) you learn that one or the other can't be accommodated, some goals may have to be sacrificed. Alternatively, all goals could be accommodated by extending schedule, adding budget, or both.

3. When making sure that budget and schedule align well with goals, make sure you talk to people that will be collaborating with you on the project. They are usually subject matter experts and you should listen closely to what they tell you. You can hold people accountable to their estimates much easier when they participate in the process of making them.

4. Once budget and schedule are approved, it's off to the races. Talk to the people every day who are involved in the project - make sure they update you on progress towards planned milestones. That way you have time to react when things don't go according to plan (and they never do).

5. Always be thinking about what can go wrong, and line up alternative plans in case they go that way. For example, the day you plan to paint the outside of your house, it could rain. What's your plan B?

6. As work progresses, bring your customer(s) by for a look at the work in progress. It may be a matter of interpretation whether something is being done correctly - and your customer always knows better than you. Having them check early and often saves you much heartache at the end.

7. When the project is complete, ask the customer to accept the work, and spend a little time thinking about how it went, what you would have done better / differently if you could do it all over again. That will make you a better project manager next time!

Tips & Warnings

• Overcommunicate everything. Face-to-face conversations, email, phone calls, pantomime - whatever it takes for people to understand what you want and what's being done.