Project Management for the Unofficial Project Manager summary

Every project has to begin somewhere. But too many aren’t initiated properly and get off on the wrong foot. After all, if a plane flying from Sydney to London starts the flight even one degree off course, it’ll end up in Rio. To illustrate the best way to initiate a project, let’s meet Eve. She’s about to embark on an important project that will save lives.

Eve works as a nurse at a Brazilian hospital that suffers from hospital-acquired infections, or HAIs. In other words, many patients at the hospital are getting sicker after arrival. After noticing an uptick in HAIs, she decides to sit down with her administrator. They brainstorm a few ideas on how to tackle the problem and the administrator asks if she’d like to lead this project to reduce HAIs at the hospital. Upon accepting, Eve becomes an unofficial project manager.

When building a plan for your project, you might want to start with scheduling goals or figuring out your deliverables, but you’d be getting ahead of yourself. Your primary concern now is to identify the risks your project involves, and this is something you need to sit down with your team to discuss. By doing this, you’ll be able to come up with different mitigation strategies if those risks ever become reality.

Let’s say you’re planning a relocation project for the company you work for and one of the major risks a team member identifies is a lack of housing at the new location. So ideally you’d want to eliminate this risk completely, but you realize that might not be so easy as the project progresses. So, you decide to add in an arrangement for temporary hotel accommodation – just in case enough houses can’t be found for relocated employees.

Now that you’ve successfully initiated and planned your project, what’s next? Well, you can finally get on with your project in earnest – and begin the third phase of successful project management – execution. It’s during this phase that one of the four fundamental behaviors of leadership is tested the most – accountability.

A lot of people get the wrong idea about accountability from the get-go. Words like “performance review” might come to mind.

Running parallel to the execution phase is the fourth process group of project management – monitoring and controlling your project. And perhaps nothing is more important in this phase than monitoring and controlling scope creep, a phenomenon that has buried many projects before their time. This comes about when the scope of a project starts to grow during the execution phase. If the scope isn’t reigned in by a project manager, it has the potential to consume the whole endeavor.

Let’s say you have someone over to fix a few broken tiles in your bathroom. After the tile worker assesses the project, they recommend retiling the whole bathroom. That way, all the tiles will match. During the project, the worker accidentally breaks through to your kitchen wall. Half a year later, you’ve spent over a hundred grand on a new bathroom and kitchen. Sure, they look great, but you’re left paying a bill in installments that’ll last for years. And all you wanted at the beginning was a few new tiles.

With the finish line in sight, all that’s left is the fifth and final phase of successful project management: closing the project effectively.

Whether your project is successful or not, it should end just as it started – with a stakeholder meeting. It’s here that you can discuss whether or not you met your goals – and whether you’re all satisfied with the end result.