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.
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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
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