Looking to update technology that runs your organization? We have 5 tips for managing technology projects, all designed to make your technology project successful.
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Tip 1: Create a Team
Any professional project manager knows that it is the people on their team who make a project successful. There is no such thing as a “lone wolf” leading successful projects.
Build your project team across departments and specialties. If your organization is small, but the impact of your technology project is large, involve the president or someone who has regular contact with the president, along with representation from all areas of the organization. Your project team should be somewhere from 4-6 people representing most of the users of the technology in the organization. As you build out your selection, testing, or deployment plans, the people on your team will have specific use-case scenarios you may never have thought of.
Tip 2: Use Modern Project Management Techniques
Using outdated or old project management techniques may end up wasting a lot of time. Modern project management breaks projects down to deliverables across project teams. One of the most flexible and modern project management techniques is called Scrum. Scrum is an overlapping development and project management process that is faster and more flexible than traditional waterfall project management techniques.
Scrum and its cousins Agile and Kanban (we are probably missing a few here) are similarly based on the concept that you can do multiple things in a project plan at one time, thus significantly speeding up the project process. The Scrum method is fully documented in the book Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland and J.J. Sutherland. While Scrum is powerful for large software development projects, many other project management tools in use are based around some form of Kanban. (For more on the differences between Scrum and Kanban, Atlassian has a great read for you.)
Tip 3: Use Modern Project Management Software
You really need good project management software to keep your project organized and moving along. While we always recommend learning and using Microsoft Project if you are a professional project manager, there are other choices out there if you are an occasional project manager. Here are a few that we have seen and like.
Microsoft Planner – Planner is a tool that is included in most Office 365 and Microsoft 365 plans. Planner is a junior/entry level version of Microsoft Project and includes all the necessities for managing smaller projects.
Trello – Trello is a project management tool from Atlassian designed to promote collaboration, manage projects, and reach new productivity peaks (their wording). We like it as an alternative to Planner if you reach the end of Planner’s features.
Asana – Asana is designed to scale much larger than Planner and Trello and can easily meet the needs of your entire organization for managing projects.
Monday – Monday is a project management solution scaled similarly to Asana where you could probably run your entire organization on it.
These are just a few of the modern project management platforms for you to explore.
Tip 4: Put the Right Person in Charge of Your Projects
Project management is both an acquired skill and a way of looking at the world. Delegating project management to the most capable project person in your organization is the best way to make sure projects are done correctly.
Tip 5: Communicate to the Organization
As a staff member, you like to be “in the loop” on what is happening in the office. It goes the same way for projects. Keeping your staff in the loop on the major projects for the organization not only keeps office rumors down but empowers the staff to assist the project team in reaching their goals and inspires teamwork.
Bonus Tip: Let us do it for you
We manage many technology projects for our clients – in fact, we have pre-defined methodologies for many common technology projects. If you are a client, we already project manage for you.
Not a client and have a project you need help with? Let us know. We are here to help.
This week’s post by Tim Malzahn, Principal Consultant at Malzahn Strategic
