Best Practices in Project Management

Document Type:Coursework

Subject Area:Management

Document 1

Projects are involving in terms of resources and time, and as such, project failure translates to an automatic loss of a huge investment. Project managers should ensure they employ best practices every step of the way towards ensuring best results when the project attains completion, it is rewarding to the project manager and his team, stakeholders and the end user. The impact of a successfully completed project is long-term and the end-users will benefit from a return on investment. Definition of the scope and objectives The initial planning of a project calls for well-defined objectives. The scope of the project defines the extent to which the project deliverables will cover. The project manager should make an estimation on the time and effort needed to facilitate each activity, decide on a realistic schedule and dependencies between activities.

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The project team should be part of this process where they should collaborate with the project manager to set milestones, which capture critical dates for each item (Salapatas, 2014). Key stakeholders should review the same and agree to the plan. Project planning falls under the initiating process group. Communication All project plans must be communicated to the project team and each team member must remain aware of their responsibilities. It is critical to understand that if all changes are acceptable, the project may delay as well go over budget. The project manager should gauge the suggested changes and decide to approve, delay or reject them. Change management can define the success of the project since the project manager is expected to control how the changed would be implemented and allocate resources to cater for changes (Buehring, 2015).

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Poor change management may culminate into project failure. The project sponsor must approve changes since failure to engage him may lead to a conflict of interest and subsequent project failure. If changed are not accompanied by scope change management procedures scope creep will be imminent. The project manager should diligently guard against scope creep to avoid project failure. Guarding against scope creep falls under the executing process group. Quality assurance A project without quality dimensions is predictive of failure. Therefore, the project manager must identify quality standards and criteria for each of project milestone, for both the project and process. against • The project sponsor must be actively engaged • The project team must understand the requirements of the industry they are operating.

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