In this article, you’ll learn about the basics of project management and how you can implement the strategies in your brand or business. So let’s get started.
What Is Product Management?
It has to do with planning, organizing, implementing, controlling, and monitoring the efforts of one or more groups to complete a particular project in a specific duration.
Project management processes are very essential and they play a vital role in the success of your projects. Research from the Project Management Institute has found that organizations that don’t integrate project management will experience an increase in their failure rate.
Why Is Project Management Important?
• You’ll meet up with your time frames:
Project management allows you to break large tasks into smaller-scale deadlines. By sticking to these milestones, projects can easily stay on schedule from beginning to end.
• You’ll increase buy-in:
Project management enables a team to build trust and credibility, among peers, customers, and stakeholders. After all, if you’re consistently submitting high-quality deliverables on time, then you’re bound to win people over.
• You can easily track spending:
You’ll be able to stay within your budget, or even under budget.
• You’ll increase your company culture:
If you foster an environment that prioritizes optimization and learning, you’ll likely inspire others and attract employees with the same mentality.
Who Is A Project Manager?
A project manager plans, organizes, and leads the execution of a project. This ensures that it meets the expected goals while delivering the required features within time and budget constraints.
Certain skills are needed for this role and they include:
• Interpersonal Skills:
Project managers (PMs) have to interact with many people, including team members, stakeholders, clients, and other project managers. A great PM should be able to work with a diverse group of people to achieve a common goal.
• Communication Skills:
Project managers must schedule frequent meetings between collaborators and provide feedback on performance. Not only do you need to know who to meet with and when, you’ll also need to balance multiple communication styles.
For example: legal will want your update in terms of contracts and risk. Meanwhile, finance will be eager to hear about your budget and spending so far, is like.
• Decision-Making Skills:
A project manager must make decisions and take responsibility for results. Being clear about objectives and setting high expectations helps maintain morale. They include prioritizing resources, developing alternative estimates, and assessing risks.
• Management skills:
Project managers are responsible for both leading a team and reporting progress to senior team members. You’ll need experience leading a team, holding one-on-ones, and addressing challenges as they arise. PMs should also be able to communicate with leadership on behalf of their teams.
The Project Management Cycle
There are about five stages in the PM Cycle, they are:
1. Initiation: In this stage, project managers take a look at a project realistically. They estimate how long the project will take, which eventually determines the baseline budget and timeline for the project.
2. Planning: The planning stage involves analyzing technical details, assigning tasks to the right team members, and identifying risks associated with different parts of the project.
3. Execution: Here you start acting on the plan you created in the previous state.
4. Monitoring and control: This step ensures you meet your time frames. Not only are you doing the work laid out in your plan, but you’re also monitoring your progress. Here, you determine whether you comply with all the regulations and industry standards. You also track all of the project expenditures and progress.
5. Closing: Bringing a project to a close is its final stage. Here, you determine whether the project delivers its intended results and whether to cancel or continue the project.
