Are you a CIO, a Research Director, a Senior Project Manager or a PMO looking to build a strong project management culture and lead successful business transformations? Do you want to improve project management? Well then, keep reading!
After successfully launching the CIO Revolution podcast, we are now building a community of transformation professionals who will share hidden insights about transformation success. With this in mind, we are pleased to present this project management guide which includes practical content and tips to help individuals challenge their organizations in a pragmatic and efficient way.
Does knowing how to type in Word make you a good writer? No! Likewise, mastering a PM tool or a Gantt chart will not make you a project management expert.
A project management approach involves responsibility sharing, task parallelization, reporting, risk analysis... It's more about management, mastering essential tools and coordinating tasks.
An academic definition reminds us that a project is “all the actions carried out by a team over a specific period of time to create or change a product or service to meet a company's or client's needs.”
The issue is that everyone knows what a project is... but, generally speaking, no one has the same definition or approach behind the word.
Far from the traditional structure in most companies, this approach implies having full awareness of project typologies: micro, strategic, multi-project, cross-functional, internal... Thus, it’s all about starting with a clear project typology to identify the three main types of framing/execution strategies.
Structuring your approach will make your delivery culture more effective and will also help achieve uniformity thanks to a reporting process across the company.
Collaborating in a cross-functional project means breaking down company silos. This is not something you can improvise. A transformation project involves many actors and processes usually coming from different departments. It’s challenging to be both efficient and engaged in all areas.
Project management needs to be reinvented to work cross-functionally.
There are three prerequisites to keep in mind:
Let’s change the way you see collaboration with no hierarchical links but with structure.
No matter your company, its size, or its industry... 80% of delays in IT projects are due to poor scoping!
So, what goes into a good project scoping document?
It's an initial draft of the project specifications, including technical aspects. The document helps enhance future project execution by guiding project teams to ask the right questions (problem to solve, expected benefits, goals, main features, effort/budget). Collaboratively creating this scoping document with the business or IT department thanks to a project scope template is considered a best practice.
With experience we learn that nothing ever goes as planned in project management. Without careful attention, deadlines and budgets are often exceeded and quality doesn’t always meet expectations.
The goal is to reduce risks through continuous risk management. In traditional project management, risks are typically identified, evaluated and mitigated once, at the start of the project, often becoming an overly complex Excel process.
However, risk management is more important now than ever.
Beyond managing the initial goal and the famous "cost-quality-time" trio, how do you keep risk analysis active throughout the project? A project risk analysis will help improve your chances of success. We’ll explain why and how to implement it, and most importantly, how to avoid turning this important process into a "deadly" bureaucratic nightmare!
The project manager’s role goes beyond overseeing execution; they are also involved in the initial phases of defining project actions.
Here, our best advice would be to delay the satisfaction of starting a project on the dot in order to verify its viability and ensure it meets the minimum quality requirements to reach completion.
This is the purpose of the project scoping document. It should gather all key information from prior technical analysis in a single document, defining the project's scope, goals and sharing important details with stakeholders.
This essential document, known as the project scope statement, will present the project's context, goals and overall organization, ensuring a well-defined and secure execution.
If, after several months worth of work, you realize you don’t have the budget to complete the project, it’s going to look bad... Yet, this is one of the most common reasons for project failure. That’s why it’s very important to define a budget and, more importantly, quantify the problem to prioritize investment plans.
For example, there's the classic trap of a 100% building budget that overlooks operating and maintenance costs. Then there’s the static budget that’s never re-evaluated. Another common pitfall is the "perfect" budget that neglects to set aside a cash reserve for unforeseen events. Indeed, for instance, in real estate projects, about 30% of costs are allocated to contingencies for delays and defects.
A budget is the lifeline of your project approach. Beyond providing detailed visibility of all project revenues and expenses, it helps you anticipate potential obstacles and set a clear course!
You believe you know all about the basics of project budgeting?
Well then, why do 53% of projects exceed their budget estimates by 189%!
Improve your insights by exploring data-driven and practical strategies. Analogy method, phased breakdown method, no estimate approach, product budget vs project budget approach...
We are convinced that project management should not be task-based, but milestone-driven!
Milestones give rhythm to projects, align teams with goals and break projects down into key stages. Most importantly, they offer an alternative to micro-managing tasks and Gantt charts.
However, defining milestones correctly is essential, choosing the right words will contribute to success.
On AirSaas, you can add milestones and mark them as "completed." They appear on the timeline and turn red if delayed.
Your project management will rapidly require a schedule to share with all stakeholders. The project team can assist in creating this initial snapshot, a kind of dashboard that clarifies the goal.
The macro-schedule establishes how you envision your project timeline, also known as a "project roadmap." Created during the project initiation phase, before any formal specifications exist, this document presents tasks, key stages and phases. This tool supports the project scoping document.
The Gantt chart and the Critical Path Method (CPM from the 1950’s) are great tools to simplify project tracking. The Gantt chart provides a visual snapshot of activities and their timing in one glance.
The Gantt chart was created in 1917 by engineer Henry Laurence Gantt, who worked alongside Taylor. He was asked to optimize workshop production, where multiple stages of manufacturing coexisted. He noticed that some operations were dependent on the completion of others, thus creating a network of dependencies. From this, he deduced that some tasks could be conducted in parallel, while others would need to follow each other.
In order to optimize production time thanks to parallel tasks, he developed a graphical system to represent the activities on a timeline: the bar chart. Each task is represented by a bar whose length is proportional to its estimated duration.
His major breakthrough? A graphical display, used as a communication tool between process participants.
The information is visually represented as follows:
The Gantt chart is one way to avoid bottlenecks and prevent delays in planned timelines.
Whether or not you're an experienced project manager, we recommend staying up-to-date with the Gantt chart and going beyond its limits!
The project weather forecast report uses weather metaphors to communicate its status and is even one of the first indicators of a project’s health.
Closely linked to continuous improvement processes, the tracking and analysis of indicators provide necessary information to teams. Often mocked for its simplicity, the weather reporting process is actually an underestimated tool for effective management.
To be effective, this indicator should be:
Indeed, managing a project often involves emotional roller coasters. Using simple visual language helps pass along clear messages to management. Among all the tracking tools, this one is your best ally.
Digital acceleration has made many traditional approaches and associated project management dashboards obsolete. Lack of collaboration, integration issues with existing tools, inappropriate data granularity and user interfaces problems. Yet, the success of digital initiatives has become a sine qua non for organizational competitiveness.
It's quite ironic as tools like data warehouses or CRMs provide great insights into sales performance, therefore visualizing and sharing the operational performance of transformation programs is far more challenging.
So think about how you can design a dashboard that fits your company’s needs. And to co-create it with involved business leaders.
No strategy can be successful without securing stakeholder buy-in.
Remember, the project is going to be tight on deadlines, quality and budget. Any big changes will mean facing problems with at least one of these constraints.
Let’s take the example of a deadline constraint with: a delay that occurs on a critical task. Since meeting deadlines is non-negotiable, you either maintain the planned quality but at a higher cost (by bringing in additional resources, outsourcing, etc.), or you stick to the budget but compromise on certain quality aspects. These are the kinds of tough decisions you’ll meet.
To make informed decisions in these scenario, you must:
This is the purpose of project tracking methods and tools.
Stakeholders are people who have an interest in the outcome of your project, either because they will influence it or will be affected by it. And believe it or not, there are always more people than you might think! This somewhat vague concept covers a wide range of realities.
Let’s admit that project tracking often overlooks or poorly handles stakeholders. Listen up, new PPM tools and platforms connected to various systems have changed this.
What frequency should you choose, which presentation should you use and how do you adapt your reporting to different people and readers?
The three key factors of an effective project progress tracking process are:
About this last one, a reminder is necessary: one project type = one type of progress review.
Incoming problem… Since everything can be considered a project (microproject, cross-functional, corporate, POC, sandbox, strategic, legal, executive...), it’s easy to lose your mind.
By not categorizing your projects, you risk using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, thus deploying important project management tools unnecessarily.
The fundamentals and advanced practices of this process are within reach: visual tools, platform use, sponsor roles, automation and synchronization with other tools.
Project reviews are held at the end of each major phase and are often scheduled at the start of the project. Whether they focus on technical, product, timeline or sprint aspects, the decisions made during the project review guide the next steps in project execution.
It contributes to building a strong project team. It is an occasion where the group collectively decides on milestone approvals and the next steps.
During your project reviews, using project management KPIs will help make sure that you’ve moved to the next phase without missing any valuable lessons from the challenges you’ve faced.
The project review is just as important as scoping and execution. This key step marks the end of active management and contractual obligations. A successful project review ensures a smooth exit and strengthens your reputation.
What is a project review? How do you conduct it effectively? What should it include? Why is it important? What are the new trends? What are the 7 best habits for effective project reviews? How are reviews conducted in other sectors? Are there templates to follow? Make sure you're up-to-date on the answers to these questions.
99% of project failures are due to poor communication plans (an unverifiable statistic from the Totally Subjective Institute :)
The communication plan is a structured framework that outlines communication actions: "who says what, to who, why, when, where, how and with what effect?"
To build the communication plan, you can use a 7-step method based on the Lasswell matrix. It's essential for the project team to take responsibility for clear communication. Properly organizing the flow of information, key points and decisions is necessary. The lack of transparency in written communication is often the cause of many project failures.
Do remember that designing your communication and investing the right amount of time into it will help align stakeholders, provide a positive experience and save time on operations. The design of the communication plan is significant to the project’s progress.
To dive deeper in this subject, check out our post about the project communication plan.
The role of reporting in ensuring the success of transformation projects is essential. A quality, rather than quantity, approach and sent frequently helps PMOs rally the organization around cross-functional initiatives.
So what's the challenge? Well, reports often take up far too much time.
However, when used with the right methodology, project reports can become an action-oriented tool. They can support every reader, regardless of their level of involvement or role in developing the future product or service, helping to make thoughtful, responsible decisions.
A project report is a carefully designed presentation of information and data. Its analysis, design and interpretation have become core challenges for effective management. Using a shared tool for project data can make it easier to build a common vision and move forward together.
Factors like data collection, frequency, number of indicators, presentation format and tools play a key role.
Flash reports are important for project management. They streamline decision-making processes and improve execution.
The AirSaas Flash Report consists of two slides: one summarizing all the project scoping information and the other one containing important details necessary for proper project execution.
A good flash report provides a concise update on the progress of ongoing projects and aims to keep stakeholders informed. The AirSaas flash report includes introductory slides (project timeline, metrics, etc.) and two slides per project covering context, progress metrics and team spirit.
Flash reports serve as a purposeful communication tool, enhancing stakeholder involvement and consequently, the success of your project management efforts. They support effective project planning and tracking, ensuring better engagement from all parties involved.
Also known as the project identification card, this document contains the main information to represent the initial definition of the project's scope and execution, including goals, stakeholders, execution team, supporters, organization, deliverable timelines, resources and risks.
A project summary document is a useful tool as it contains a full view of the organization of the project or part of it. It is a basic deliverable in which the project manager lists all phases, steps and actions that need to be completed throughout the project’s execution.
Don’t forget that every project is different! The idea of one size that fits all, doesn't actually fit anyone… Your project summary must therefore be adapted to your specific context and challenges.
The most common project summary templates include:
Who should write it? Who approves it? How does it differ depending on the type of project? Is there a template to adapt? Anticipate those questions ahead of time.
After the pandemic, the great resignation, through project overload, cross-functional management, hybrid work, AI, no-code... You've surely noticed: project management has changed since 1917 when Henry Laurence Gantt invented a model to optimize workshop production.
We live and work in a VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) world. In response, new project management approaches have emerged, such as milestone-based management, decision centralization, one-click reports, collaboration, hybrid project management and governance.
What beliefs should we rethink to avoid setbacks and failures in project delivery? What needs to be added to maintain both enjoyment and efficiency in the process? Are there new trends to keep an eye on to anticipate the future of project management? think ahead to speed up your company’s transformation!
Need to find a project portfolio management solution that helps you manage the governance of your transformation programs and cross-business projects more efficiently? Discover Airsaas, the next-gen PPM tool that enables you to visualize at a glance all key information in a unified, collaborative platform, simplify decision-making, and save time on your reporting.
