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Planning - It’s Easier Than You Think (And More Important Too)

January 27th, 2008    Subscribe To Our Feed

It’s almost impossible to overemphasize the importance of planning. The planning process can seem very daunting to many people who are new to project management. How can I plan something if I’ve never done it before? How do I know what needs to be done? The short answer to this is, you just do it, even though you don’t really know. Of course, there is also a longer answer to this question.

I’m going to do something that drives some people nuts, but please play along anyway. I’m going to answer this question with a question. How can you plan a trip to Phoenix if you’ve never been there before? So, what do this imaginary trip to Phoenix and an internet marketing project (or any other project for that matter) have in common? They are all projects.

It occurs to me that up until this point, the only place where I have posted a definition of a project is on the “Why Project Management?” page. As I stated on that page, a project is a temporary and one-time endeavor undertaken to create a unique product or service, which brings about beneficial change or added value. (Thanks to Wikipedia for this definition.)

So, back to our trip to Phoenix. Unless you are planning to start driving there once a month, we can consider this a temporary and one-time endeavor. Also, the vacation or business trip or family obligation that brought you to Phoenix is the unique product, and hopefully it was at least intended to bring beneficial change or add value. So we can consider this a project.

Where should we begin in the planning process? I’m sure most people have their own preference, but I like to determine the reason for going first. I would call this our primary objective for the project. For the sake of argument, it is a vacation. There are so many other questions to answer though. Where will you stay? How long will you be there? Are there any specific things you have planned to do while you are there? What clothes do you need to pack? What route will you take to get there? This is all part of the planning.

Most of us don’t give this type of planning a second thought, because we have planned dozens of vacations in the past, so we have an idea of the things we need to plan, and we use that as a starting point. Then we research and find the answers to our questions and possibly find more questions to answer. Eventually, we have it planned down to the point where we have our suitcase packed, we are in the car with a map and a triptik from AAA with the route highlighted. We are leaving at about the time we had planned, and we know about when we will arrive. Our hotel is booked, and we even have restaurant reservations for that evening.

If planning a trip is just like planning any other project, why does it seem so hard? In actuallity, if you have been involved in internet marketing for any length of time, and you have launched a new product or built a web site or started a new marketing campaign, you are probably already planning in an informal way, similar to how you plan a vacation. Very few people write out a project plan for their vacation.

Planning keeps you on course. Planning a project is like writing a list before going to the grocery store. I don’t know about you, but if I didn’t make out a list, it is unlikely I will get even half of what I need. Also, I end up spending more because I buy things I don’t need. Planning keeps you on course.

Hopefully by now you understand that planning is not as hard as you might think, and it is vitally important to the overall success of your project. In my next post, I will talk about the tools you need and how to go about planning your project.

Initiating A Project – The First Process

January 16th, 2008    Subscribe To Our Feed

In the corporate world, there is usually a lot of pomp and circumstance that goes into this particular process group. There are project approval committees, reports, business justifications, and often lots of politics to boot. However, I think this may be the most often overlooked process for entrepreneurs who understand the project management process. And that’s a shame, because it can prove to be vitally important.

Allow me to explain. First, I’m going to make a couple of assumptions. I assume that you have only a limited amount of time to work on your projects. Further, I assume that you also have limited other resources, such as money, to use in your projects. If neither of these assumptions applies to your situation then you may safely ignore the initiating process. However, if even one applies, you should take this process very seriously.

The reason this process is so important is precisely because it allows you to make a more informed choice before committing your limited time and other resources to a project. It gives you a structured process in which you can compare the different potential projects competing for your attention.

If initiating is usually justifying a project to a committee to get it approved, how can you use this process in your small business? Set up a somewhat formal process for choosing the next project. Write down all the projects you have on the table, the reasons why you want to work on each one, and the benefit it will bring to your business. Then use this information to compare them to help you choose the project that will bring the biggest benefit to your business or that has the greatest pull for you to work on it.

You can make this process as formal as you want it. For my projects, the first question I ask is if it can be expected to make immediate cash flow, or if this will take time. The next criteria for me is how much of my time is required, followed by how much money investment. Once these criteria narrow down the projects to just a few, I look for the one that looks to be the most interesting or the most fun.

I keep an active list of projects I will consider working on. Along with this list I keep the information to answer the questions above. Therefore the only time I really spend on this process is the time to decide which of the top few I want to work on most. However, especially if you are just starting to use this process, you may find that it takes you some time to get the list with your chosen information, then it takes some additional time to decide. This is to be expected in the beginning, but once you are using this process for a while you will get to the point where you are just choosing from the top projects on your list, and each time you come up with a potential project you will add it to the list with the necessary information.

Project Management Process Groups

January 14th, 2008    Subscribe To Our Feed

Until I really started writing down ideas for posts for this blog, I didn’t realize just how much there is to explain about managing a project. There is so much that it can become very overwhelming very quickly. I think this is part of the reason why many people don’t learn about project management, even though it could help them in running their business. In many ways the best practices for managing projects come off as very formal and process intensive, which is not what most small business people are looking for. Because of that, one of my goals with this blog is to give you the information to understand the formal processes, and then show you how this can be applied to your business.

The other thing I noticed was that I wasn’t sure where to start. There is so much out there, what do you need to know first? Well, I’ve decided to start by explaining the structure behind project management, along with some examples of using this to manage internet marketing or other small business projects. So lets dive right in then, shall we?

The Project Management Institute has defined five process groups for managing projects. Essentially, these are logical groupings of related processes, and each stands alone, however in actually managing projects they overlap significantly. The five groups are initiating, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling, and closing. Lets take a quick look at each group and how they interact with one another.

The first group is initiating. Simply put, this is the processes you would go through to decide if you are going to start a project, and then kicking it into the planning stage. This group doesn’t really interact with the other groups, except in moving the project into planning. This is important, however, since it is likely that you have many potential projects to work on, and you should spend some time deciding up front if a project is worth your time and effort.

The next group is planning. Although you spend the most time planning at the beginning of a project, you continue to update and change the plan based on results in your project, and if you have more than one phase to a project each phase would have its own planning taking place in conjunction with and separate from the overall project plan.

Following the planning group would be executing. Once you have your baseline or original plan, you begin execution. Execution, you may have guessed, is where you do the work of the project. This is the real meat of your project and is where the majority of your time and effort should be spent.

The monitoring and controlling group is the one group that interacts the most with the other groups. You would be monitoring and controlling your project right from the beginning of the planning stages and continue into closing. This is where you would take checkpoints or milestones you set up during planning and ensure that you are keeping your project on time, on budget, within the scope you set and to the quality standard you expect. If you are not monitoring and controlling your projects, you will find yourself with run away expenses or a project that takes twice as long as it should have. Along with the planning activities, monitoring and controlling activities are vitally important to the success of your project.

The final group is closing. This group is important to you because this is where you will tie off any loose ends and make sure you have everything ready to move this into your day to day operations if it is something you will continue.

Over the next few days, I am going to be exploring each of these groups in more depth and giving you examples drawn from internet marketing. In order to see all of these posts together once they are up, they will all be in a separate category called Process Groups, which you can find in the navigation links on the right side of the page.

Cheers,

Chris

A Project Should Have Only One Primary Objective

January 13th, 2008    Subscribe To Our Feed

There should always only be one primary objective to any project. Projects can have other requirements or minor objectives, but these should support the primary objective. If you find that your projects have multiple objectives, break them down into multiple projects, then make one larger project to manage these smaller ones.

For example, you have a project to build a web site, and your objectives are to build 100 pages of content, drive 500 unique visitors to the site per day and develop 1000 backlinks to the site. This should probably become three separate projects, with a parent project to manage all three of these concurrently.

Business Justification

January 10th, 2008    Subscribe To Our Feed

In this instance, I am not telling you to justify your projects. Rather, I am going to lay out my business justification for this blog. I will endeavor to tell you why this blog is worth spending your valuable time reading, and how I hope it will help you in your business.

I’d like to give you a bit of background on me, so we can begin to get to know one another. I am an IT Infrastructure project manager contracted to a Fortune 100 company, and have been for several years now. I started my first online venture in 2005, selling items on eBay. I failed at that and several subsequent ventures until I realized that my business would run best if it was managed as a series of projects rather than as a more traditional business.

This is not a new concept. Many software development and other companies use this style of management because it fits with the type of work they perform. My experience has shown me that it is a good fit for internet marketing also.

As an entrepreneur starting out on the internet, I would suggest to you that you are really just an untrained project manager. I’d like to help you change that. I believe that if you cut through the jargon and some of the formality of project management practices, you will find that it makes good sense and helps you run your business more effectively.

My goal here is to show you tips, techniques, practices and even some case studies on managing your internet marketing projects. I very much appreciate feedback, so please let me know what’s on your mind in the comments section below.

I’ll talk to you again soon,

Chris

Welcome to InternetMarketingPM.com!

January 8th, 2008    Subscribe To Our Feed

Hello everyone,

This is the first post I am publishing here at the Internet Marketing Project Manager blog, so I feel compelled to say hello. Also, I have decided not to have an “About Me” page here on this blog, mainly because this blog is not “About Me.” It is about you, and your business, and providing the tips, tricks, tools and other stuff that you need to make your business successful through project management.

So why do I advocate project management so thoroughly that I have dedicated an entire blog to the topic? Part of that answer you will find in the permanent page I have put up titled Why Project Management? The other reason is because I myself have worked as a corporate project manager, and I learned from this experience many things that I believe will benefit you and your business.

Stay tuned to this blog for information about how to create a project schedule, how to determine the scope of your project, when a product can be considered “good enough,” and many more tips related to your project management efforts. I am very open also to questions and suggestions, so please make use of the comments section to post your questions, suggestions, criticisms, praise, or any other related thought you might be having.

The best and most reliable way to stay informed about new blog posts is to subscribe to the RSS feed. In the near future, I will be adding a newsletter which will include information not found here on the blog, so keep your eyes out for that. Thanks for stopping by.

Chris

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