5 keys steps to creating a Successful Project: Planning & Strategy
Creating successful projects requires clear strategy and thorough planning. By taking the time to carefully consider your goals, resources, and potential obstacles (risks) before you start the execution, you can set yourself up for success and ensure that your projects will run smoothly from the very beginning to the very end.
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
Table of contents
Step 1: Define your Project Goals (or your why)
The first step in creating a successful project is to clearly define your goals. Another way to look at this is to make sure you are defining your “why” for the projects. Asking things like, what do you want to achieve with this project? Are you looking to increase sales, improve customer satisfaction, or create a new product or service? Once you have a clear understanding of your goals, you can begin to develop a strategy for achieving them.
When creating goals, you want to make sure they are measurable and specific. One way to do that is by using SMART goals.
Setting specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals will help you to track your progress and ensure that you are on track to achieving your overall project goals.
Step 2: Understand the Customer / User / Target Audience
Another really important element to running successful projects lies in using the right strategies in order to identify who your target audience is. This could mean identifying the customer, the stakeholder, or any other person you may intend to benefit from the outcomes of your project. Things you might find yourself asking: Who will be using my product or service? What are their needs and wants? Understanding your target audience will help you to create a project that is tailored to their needs and more likely to be successful.
Because… who wants to build something no one wants (or needs)?
Step 3: Project Resource Management – do you have the time and the people?
Next, it’s important to identify the resources you will need to complete your project. This includes both tangible resources, such as funding and equipment, and intangible resources, such as the skills and expertise of your team. It’s important to have a clear understanding of what resources you have available and what you will need to acquire in order to complete your project.
Failing to do this step will mean that you will run the risk of running out of resources during the implementation and execution of the project.
Step 4: Start Project Planning
Once you have a clear understanding of your goals, target audience, and resources, it’s time to start planning. A detailed project plan will help you to stay on track and ensure that all tasks are completed on time. This should include a timeline for each task, as well as a clear understanding of who is responsible for completing each task. A RACI matrix can also be helpful during the planning process.
When creating your project plan, it’s important to also consider potential hurdles that may come up. What challenges or risks do you anticipate? What steps can you take to mitigate these risks? Risks should also be identified by likelihood and by impact. Creating a clear overview risks in this way will allow stakeholders and other project parties to have a clear understanding of what could come up and to also be on alert.
By anticipating potential obstacles, you can develop a plan to address them and ensure that your project stays on track.
Step 5: Communication, communication, communication
Project Planning needs effective communication
Finally, effective communication is crucial for the success of any project. As the project leader, it’s important to keep all team members, stakeholders, etc informed of progress, changes, and any issues that arise. Regular team meetings and clear lines of communication will help to ensure that everyone is on the same page and working towards the same goals.
Consider a project as something that is alive, so to speak. Projects move and change with the changes in the world, business, and with the team. The project changes as team members build and make changes. More things come up and those things will need to be shared across the entire project team.
Keeping everyone on the same page also helps to create a transparency that is relevant to keeping the important parties aware of these shifts.
Summary
In summary, creating successful projects requires a clear strategy and thorough planning. By setting clear goals, identifying your target audience, understanding your resources, developing a detailed project plan, anticipating potential obstacles, setting SMART goals, and communicating effectively with your team, you can set yourself up for success and ensure that your project runs smoothly from start to finish.
Leantime offers the features you need to run a project to its success and is built for intuitiveness and ease of set up. If you’re in need of a system to manage a project from idea to completion.
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Gloria Folaron
Gloria Folaron is the CEO and founder of Leantime. A Nurse first, she describes herself as an original non-project manager. Being diagnosed with ADHD later in life, she has hands on experience in navigating the world of project and product management and staying organized with ADHD.
