Tips for Achieving Better Project Outcomes

Completing a project on time and completing a project successfully are two different notions. As a project management professional, you need your project outcome to be as successful as possible. Follow these six tips to achieve better project outcomes.

1. Avoiding Ambiguity Enhances Project Outcomes

Ambiguous instructions lead to errors by members of the project management team, upper-level management and skilled workers. You will face an unprecedented amount of rework at the end of a project if you fail to provide clear, precise instructions to your staff. Always avoid ambiguity.

2. Understand the Strategic Goals of Your Project

Your project should align with the strategic goals of your company. Make sure you clearly define your strategic goals for your project, and use these goals in the creation and modification of your schedule.

This will help you avoid unnecessary delays, erroneous changes in the schedule and increases in your budget.

3. Project Outcomes Rely on Successful Project Delivery Processes

When the physical work is finished, you need to follow standard delivery processes. Compile all reports, review what problems were encountered and how they could have been handled better, review the performance of your team members and perform quality assurance checks.

This will help your project be in tip-top shape for project delivery, and it serves as an opportunity to prepare the project management team for the next project.

4. Keep Stakeholders Involved

Involved stakeholders are happy stakeholders. Keep stakeholders involved in your decision-making processes, and provide reports to stakeholders on a recurring, frequent basis. This ensure stakeholders understand the status of the project and what may be needed in order to complete the project on budget and by the deadline.

5. Fast-Track Projects Where Appropriate

Completing a project ahead of schedule is one of the most beneficial factors in successful project outcomes. Condense tasks and activities when this action will not undermine the quality of the project. Furthermore, you must carefully monitor the budget during fast-tracking to ensure overtime or outsourced labor sources do not exceed reasonable expectations.

6. Manage Risk Throughout the Project

Threats and opportunities will continue to evolve over the course of your project. Today’s opportunities may be tomorrow’s devastating risks. Re-evaluate and manage risk throughout the project. Moreover, assign members of your project management team to continually re-evaluate once per week, if not more often.

Furthermore, everyone in your project management team should consider how all decisions impact risk, and when risks change, the entire team should be notified. This will help to avoid organization silos within your team.

Modern technology has given project management professionals an unparalleled ability to effectively and efficiently manage projects. However, you can enhance the outcome of your project by fully utilizing these six tips in all of your processes and actions.

Key Takeaway

• Always clearly explain what you mean when giving direction.
• Understand how the goals of your project relate to individual processes.
• Follow standard processes during project delivery.
• Request feedback from stakeholders, and provide updates to stakeholders on a recurring basis.
• Reduce the risk for delays by fast-tracking parts of your project.
• Manage risk from start to finish to achieve a better project outcome.