http://www.dumblittleman.com/2008/07/7-steps-to-completing-your-projects-on.html

Well, here are 7 simple steps I take to help properly plan my projects. Which have you tried, which do you use, and what can you improve upon?

• Organize your thoughts You have a general idea for a project, but you’re unsure about the specifics. Organize your thoughts and expand your idea to include the details. I use mind maps to organize and expand my ideas because they make it easy for me to share my thoughts with others and because they are a highly flexible organizational tool.

• Define clear objectives This sounds obvious, but there are a large number of people who get an idea and sit down and start working on a project without a clear idea of what they actually want to accomplish.

  “Making a better accounting system” is not a clear objective; what does that even mean?

  Develop specific, measurable objectives instead, such as “develop an accounting system which will automate payroll and reduce our payroll processing overhead by 30%.” Your project won’t have a prayer of being successful or on budget if you don’t have clear, measurable expectations and goals.

• Do your homework You might think you’re the first person to come up with a solution to a specific problem, but are you sure? Is there an existing solution which might suit your needs? Are there some components of your project that can be replaced with cheap, off-the-shelf solutions?

  Find answers to these questions before you do anything. If you’re designing a new car, don’t start by reinventing the wheel; incorporate existing solutions into your project where applicable.

• Build a clear execution plan Before you begin working on your project, you need to determine how you’re going to execute your project. Where do you begin? Do you set goals first? Build a team first? Or budget the project first? Figure it out and get a clear idea of when each phase of your project needs to begin. You start building a house by designing it on paper first, not laying a foundation.

  Determine each of the steps in your build process and then establish clear deliverables that must be produced before you proceed from one step to another. I use mind maps and Gantt charts to decompose my projects into smaller, more manageable deliverables; I also find that Gantt charts are quite helpful for scheduling my projects in addition to helping me budget them.

• Establish clear, material deliverables for each step Each project should be broken down into deliverables or milestones. Each step in the execution plan for your project should consist of one or more major deliverables to be produced after a reasonable amount of time.

  Think of a golf game as a project – rather than try to win the entire game at once, golfers break down the game into 18 holes and break each hole down into a number of strokes. Each hole is a step in the project and each stroke is a deliverable. Tiger Woods doesn’t play each of his strokes thinking about how his current stroke might affect his overall score – he concentrates on making his current stoke the best stroke possible.

  When you go about planning your project, you should establish a number of clear, material deliverables for each step. “Complete project research” is not a clear deliverable – its intangible, meaningless fluff. A clear, material deliverable is “produce a report detailing the competitive environment for our target market.”

• Break down the time required of each deliverable Once you break down your project into specific deliverables, the process of budgeting and scheduling a project becomes much easier; the deliverables in your project are small enough to measure accurately. Establish your project’s budget by summing up the time and money to produce each deliverable.

• Make room for errors The most important and easiest step in making sure that your project doesn’t go over budget is budgeting room for error! It’s only a matter of time before something goes wrong with a project; something may take longer than expected, your computer might crash, or you might have to wait on a third party, and so forth.

  It’s better to give yourself some wiggle room ahead of time than to apologize to your boss later for going over budget. Identify key areas of your project that are particularly vulnerable to error and make a reasonable assessment for how much extra time and money you are going to need in case an error occurs. Once you’ve done that, simply factor the amount into your budget.

thanks for putting this up !!! :)

As a discipline, project management developed from different fields of application including construction, engineering, and defense. In the United States, the forefather of project management is Henry Gantt, called the father of planning and control techniques, who is famously known for his use of the Gantt chart as a project management tool, for being an associate of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s theories of scientific management¹, and for his study of the work and management of Navy ship building. His work is the forerunner to many modern project management tools including the work breakdown structure (WBS) and resource allocation.

The 1950s marked the beginning of the modern project management era. Again, in the United States, prior to the 1950s, projects were managed on an ad hoc basis using mostly Gantt Charts, and informal techniques and tools. At that time, two mathematical project scheduling models were developed: (1) the “Program Evaluation and Review Technique” or PERT, developed by Booz-Allen & Hamilton as part of the United States Navy’s (in conjunction with the Lockheed Corporation) Polaris missile submarine program²; and (2) the “Critical Path Method” (CPM) developed in a joint venture by both DuPont Corporation and Remington Rand Corporation for managing plant maintenance projects. These mathematical techniques quickly spread into many private enterprises.

At the same time, technology for project cost estimating, cost management, and engineering economics was evolving, with pioneering work by Hans Lang and others. In 1956, the American Association of Cost Engineers (now AACE International; the Association for the Advancement of Cost Engineering) was formed by early practitioners of project management and the associated specialties of planning and scheduling, cost estimating, and cost/schedule control (project control). AACE has continued its pioneering work and in 2006 released the first ever integrated process for portfolio, program and project management(Total Cost Management Framework).

In 1969, the Project Management Institute (PMI) was formed to serve the interest of the project management industry. The premise of PMI is that the tools and techniques of project management are common even among the widespread application of projects from the software industry to the construction industry. In 1981, the PMI Board of Directors authorized the development of what has become A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide), containing the standards and guidelines of practice that are widely used throughout the profession. The International Project Management Association (IPMA), founded in Europe in 1967, has undergone a similar development and instituted the IPMA Competence Baseline (ICB). The focus of the ICB also begins with knowledge as a foundation, and adds considerations about relevant experience, interpersonal skills, and competence. Both organizations are now participating in the development of an ISO project management standard.

Project management is quite often the province and responsibility of an individual project manager. This individual seldom participates directly in the activities that produce the end result, but rather strives to maintain the progress and productive mutual interaction of various parties in such a way that overall risk of failure is reduced.

A project manager is often a client representative and has to determine and implement the exact needs of the client, based on knowledge of the firm they are representing. The ability to adapt to the various internal procedures of the contracting party, and to form close links with the nominated representatives, is essential in ensuring that the key issues of cost, time, quality, and above all, client satisfaction, can be realized.

In whatever field, a successful project manager must be able to envision the entire project from start to finish and to have the ability to ensure that this vision is realized.

Any type of product or service — Pharmaceuticals, buildings, vehicles, electronics, computer software, financial services, etc. — may have its implementation overseen by a project manager and its operations by a product manager.

Project Management is the discipline of planning, organizing, and managing resources to bring about the successful completion of specific project goals and objectives. A project is a finite endeavor—having specific start and completion dates—undertaken to create a unique product or service which brings about beneficial change or added value. This finite characteristic of projects stands in sharp contrast to processes, or operations, which are permanent or semi-permanent functional work to repetitively produce the same product or service. In practice, the management of these two systems is often found to be quite different, and as such requires the development of distinct technical skills and the adoption of separate management philosophy, which is the subject of this article.

The primary challenge of project management is to achieve all of the project goals and objectives while adhering to classic project constraints—usually scope, quality, time and budget. The secondary—and more ambitious—challenge is to optimize the allocation and integration of inputs necessary to meet pre-defined objectives. A project is a carefully defined set of activities that use resources (money, people, materials, energy, space, provisions, communication, motivation, etc.) to achieve the project goals and objectives.

Like any human undertaking, projects need to be performed and delivered under certain constraints. Traditionally, these constraints have been listed as “scope,” “time,” and “cost”. These are also referred to as the “Project Management Triangle,” where each side represents a constraint. One side of the triangle cannot be changed without affecting the others. A further refinement of the constraints separates product “quality” or “performance” from scope, and turns quality into a fourth constraint.

The Project Management Triangle The time constraint refers to the amount of time available to complete a project. The cost constraint refers to the budgeted amount available for the project. The scope constraint refers to what must be done to produce the project’s end result. These three constraints are often competing constraints: increased scope typically means increased time and increased cost, a tight time constraint could mean increased costs and reduced scope, and a tight budget could mean increased time and reduced scope.

The discipline of project management is about providing the tools and techniques that enable the project team (not just the project manager) to organize their work to meet these constraints.

Another approach to project management is to consider the three constraints as finance, time and human resources. If you need to finish a job in a shorter time, you can throw more people at the problem, which in turn will raise the cost of the project, unless by doing this task quicker we will reduce costs elsewhere in the project by an equal amount.

Cost to develop a project depends on several variables including (chiefly): resource costs, labor rates, material rates, risk management (i.e.cost contingency), Earned value management, plant (buildings, machines, etc.), equipment, cost escalation, indirect costs, and profit. But beyond this basic accounting approach to fixed and variable costs, the economic cost that must be considered includes worker skill and productivity which is calculated by variation to project cost estimates. This is important when companies hire temporary or contract employees or outsource work.

Time For analytical purposes, the time required to produce a deliverable is estimated using several techniques. One method is to identify tasks needed to produce the deliverables documented in a work breakdown structure or WBS. The work effort for each task is estimated and those estimates are rolled up into the final deliverable estimate.

The tasks are also prioritized, dependencies between tasks are identified, and this information is documented in a project schedule. The dependencies between the tasks can affect the length of the overall project (dependency constrained), as can the availability of resources (resource constrained). Time is not considered a cost nor a resource since the project manager cannot control the rate at which it is expended. This makes it different from all other resources and cost categories. It should be remembered that no effort expended will have any higher quality than that of the effort- expenders.

Requirements specified to achieve the end result. The overall definition of what the project is supposed to accomplish, and a specific description of what the end result should be or accomplish. A major component of scope is the quality of the final product. The amount of time put into individual tasks determines the overall quality of the project. Some tasks may require a given amount of time to complete adequately, but given more time could be completed exceptionally. Over the course of a large project, quality can have a significant impact on time and cost (or vice versa).

Together, these three constraints have given rise to the phrase “On Time, On Spec, On Budget.” In this case, the term “scope” is substituted with “spec(ification).”

Project management is composed of several different types of activities such as:

• Analysis and design of objectives and events
• Planning the work according to the objectives
• Assessing and controlling risk (or Risk Management)
• Estimating resources
• Allocation of resources
• Organizing the work
• Acquiring human and material resources
• Assigning tasks
• Directing activities
• Controlling project execution
• Tracking and reporting progress (Management information system)
• Analyzing the results based on the facts achieved
• Defining the products of the project
• Forecasting future trends in the project
• Quality Management
• Issues management
• Issue solving
• Defect prevention
• dentifying, managing & controlling changes
• Project closure (and project debrief)
• Communicating to stakeholders
• Increasing / decreasing a company’s workers