Name five critical success factors and why they are important to the success of a project

This preview shows page 2 - 5 out of 5 pages.

The world is changing fast, but when it comes to managing successful projects, many things stay tried and true. Ultimately, you want to foster a powerhouse project team that’s focused on objectives and responsive to new information. Here are eight key factors that can help make a project successful.

Clear Project Goals and Objectives

To achieve success, it has to be clear what the project success criteria are. Before starting, help your team understand what you want to achieve — not just for your project but also for your client’s business or community.

Align with relevant stakeholders on your key performance indicators (KPIs), and if possible, keep them visible. As you arrive at critical decision points, go back to these goals to determine the best courses of action.

Read more: How to Write SMART Project Management Goals

Diligent Research and Data Gathering

One of the most important project success factors is the discovery phase, when project managers work closely with clients to gain more insight into their problems, industry, past initiatives, capabilities, and more. This will equip you with information to formulate better strategies and anticipate possible hurdles.

When projects start, it’s tempting to jump the gun and get to work. It’s exciting while you’re brimming with ideas. Plus, a quick and straightforward schedule can impress stakeholders.

However, it’s important to remember that the benefits of forgoing this critical stage are only temporary, and will quickly be eclipsed by their downsides. If you want to increase your chances of success, don’t skip the discovery phase!

Grounded Estimates and Plans

Unrealistic estimates and lofty promises are the most common ways project teams set themselves up for project failure. It can be tempting to give small, aggressive estimates because they seem to define the team members’ competence. But if you want to increase your project’s chance of success, you and your team may have to learn to set this ego aside or work around it.

Consider using good planning methods like planning poker, where discussions are encouraged around estimates. Look into your best, worst, and most realistic scenarios. Add padding and contingencies as needed. Conduct project planning according to how things are, not how you want things to be.

Optimized Workflow and Systems

Systems and workflows are set processes for your team to follow when implementing your project plans. They’re efficient ways to set expectations and manage communication. They also minimize confusion, which can be massively beneficial during the busiest phases.

Take the time to evaluate your workflow and system after critical phases of your project to spot inefficiencies. Check in with your team and stakeholders to identify areas you can automate and optimize project management strategies.

Barring extreme situations, it’s not advisable to do major overhauls in the middle of a project. Still, keep an eye on tweaks that can offer tremendous results.

Read more: Workflow Management Software and Tools: 2022 Guide

Real-Time Progress and Resource Tracking

Once you start executing project tasks, you’ll have a natural tendency to focus only on what’s at hand. But as the project manager, it’s your responsibility to keep your goals and project objectives in view. Without this presence of mind, you risk wasting resources and missing deadlines.

Nowadays, project management software is equipped with features for real-time task tracking and reporting, productivity monitoring, budget management and cost tracking, and more. Maximizing these features can enable you and your team to spot bottlenecks, foresee issues and delays, and stay in touch with your big objectives as you make incremental project progress.

Scope, Change, and Priority Management

With the rise of information overload, it can be tempting for teams and stakeholders to implement every new idea and iterate after every exciting insight. While project management methodologies such as Agile Scrum exist to welcome new findings and iterations, these iterations should still come with thorough discernment and evaluation.

Finding the balance between openness to new ideas and firmness against scope creep is critical for project managers. While change can be good, new changes in scope have to be evaluated against the project’s objectives and the availability of resources. Keep priorities clear to help your team manage their efforts — so they don’t go to waste.

Healthy Team Culture

If you’ve ever wondered how self-managing teams exist, then you’ve already stumbled upon the importance of healthy team culture.

A team’s culture defines what they consider normal and unusual. This influences their decisions and actions, regardless of whether they’re being supervised by management. Safety, empowerment, and accountability create a breeding ground for collaboration, constructive feedback, problem-solving, initiative, and grit.

Successfully maintaining this can help your team perform optimally, even when they’re left to their own devices.

Read more: Identifying & Managing Toxic Workplace Behaviors

Documentation and Knowledge Management

Another critical success factor in project management is constant improvement. In order for actions and decisions to be reviewed, they have to first be properly documented. Documentation can feel like an extra administrative task for project managers. But done right, it has many benefits.

Proper documentation and knowledge management can help you trace your team’s thought process. You can use this to communicate better with stakeholders, onboard new team members, and conduct object evaluations at the end of your project. Leveraging your previous findings in future projects is also made possible when these are adequately recorded.

Finally, documenting your project success can increase your team’s credibility and help you acquire more clients moving forward.

Check out these Project Management Courses from TechRepublic Academy!

A Solid Foundation Is Key to Project Success

The key to building an agile and productive team is providing a solid foundation with sound systems and values. This firm grounding in project management will empower project team members to explore new ideas, take risks, and ultimately succeed and innovate.

Let’s begin with a quick description of what project success actually is before we get to the success factors. The answers seem simple at first glance: a project is deemed good if the purpose of the project is achieved. That implies you’ve set concrete objectives. But actually it is not enough to meet your project objectives to consider a project to be good. You may achieve your project objectives but fail to achieve several other goals related to the project’s completion.

Factors in Success

In project management, there are lots of studies on success factors. Results vary depending on the participants, the size of the study, and the industry. Nevertheless, some recurring factors are evident that seem to play a crucial role, regardless of the context of a project.

Let’s have a look at such factors:

1. Experienced Project Managers & Professional Project Team Leaders

You can understand the theory and methods of project management, but experience is one of the key factors of success in the end. The more experienced a project manager, the more likely he/she will be able to overcome the daily project challenges. To avoid misunderstandings, keep clear roles and responsibilities in mind. Successful project managers are known not only by technical knowledge but also by leadership.

Ensure that the team members have the necessary skills to deliver the results required and bring a positive attitude to the project. Also, as a whole, the team must function. So it is essential to build a team that is motivated to work towards a common goal together.

2. Methodic Approach

For success, the choice of a suitable methodology for project management is crucial. To ensure that your process is clear, reliable, and efficient, follow the trends and techniques of the framework you have chosen. All stakeholders should understand and agree on investing time to define a clear project objective.

3. Proper Planning

Many project managers hurry to the project execution stage and do not take sufficient time for sound planning. Don’t make a mistake here. Invest sufficient time and resources in thorough scheduling.

4. Adhere to the Best Practices

The wheel does not need to be reinvented. Project management itself is a challenge. Use frameworks and best practices wherever possible. Instead of constructing everything from the ground up, draw from the experience of past successes and adapt proven strategies to your individual case. This enables you to concentrate your resources on your project’s really distinctive elements that will make all the difference.

5. Monitoring & Control

Check your progress and regularly evaluate the results. To quickly understand if the project is on track, define key performance indicators (KPI), and use reports. You will recognize early on when things go sideways and can take countermeasures before greater harm is done.

6. Use a Professional Software

The quality of your chosen tools has a direct effect on the quality of your management. The role of project management software is commonly underestimated. Professional and intuitive software minimizes the risk of errors and miscalculations, provides the best possible overview of all relevant KPIs, and reliably displays significant data on all necessary devices. The software promotes safe and easy team collaboration and is the basis for providing access to the information needed by each team member.

Invest in a professional and specific tool instead of working with Excel or other spreadsheet programs not created for project management needs. It will simplify your job, and it will affect the success of your project.

7. Effective Communication

With proper communication, many undesirable developments in projects could be prevented or at least discovered earlier. Ensure that formal communication processes (meetings, documentation), as well as informal processes, are implemented and used. Communication between members of the team plays an important role. Offer opportunities for your employees to come together outside the official meetings, for example, in your offices in a coffee corner or a chat tool.

8. Work with Commited People

Any strategy and plan have the ability to fully fall apart without the right team in place. As a result, the core project staff, specialist resources, manufacturers, and all stakeholders should be part of the team dynamic. All those involved must be committed to the group, share similar project visions and strive to achieve overall success.

It is important to assign the right individuals to each aspect of the project and make sure they work together well. In addition, to have the most successful result, the entire team should be fully informed and involved, which means that communication has to be on par.

9. Careful Management of Risks

Project managers know that planned things rarely go off. It is essential to produce a risk log with an action plan for the project’s risks during the planning process. Ensure that your risk log is known by all key stakeholders and know where they can find it. If something happens, with the management plan that has already been set up, the team can quickly resolve the problem. When facing project risks, this will give the team confidence and help the customers feel comfortable with the project’s progress.

10. Strong Closure of Project

If there is no strong closure for a project, it can continue to consume resources. The project team must be firm and agree with the client that it has met all critical success factors. It is necessary to agree and sign off on confirmation of the project delivery, testing, and release. Satisfaction surveys are good forms of documentation for future reference to be logged and filed and valuable information for future use.