Don't Forget the Fundamentals of Project-Based Work

 

Most nine-year-olds I knew, played little league baseball.  Like most teams, we practiced several times a week.  Throwing, hitting, running, and other drills were never the fun part of baseball practice—we wanted to play the game.  I've since come to appreciate how learning the fundamentals is important in any field of endeavor.  In my opinion, managing projects is no different.  Here are some of the fundamental project management best practices I think apply to successful work management:

1. Make sure the project has a clearly defined business objective—and that everyone involved in the project understands what it is: It's important for stakeholders and project teams to understand the business value of what they're doing.  Keeping the project vision visible and accessible enables everyone involved in the project to stay focused on what's important—and that keeps scope creep to a minimum.
2. Make sure the project has executive commitment to see it through:  One of the quickest ways to kill a project is to pull its funding out from under it.  A committed executive can also help promote the merits of the project to others within the organization to build a broader base of stakeholder support.
3. Make sure there is a shared sense of determination to finish the project: If the only member of the team committed to finish the project is the project manager, it's not likely the project will ever be completed.  Individual team members and executive stakeholders need to have the same determination.  Without a shared sense of determination to finish, projects languish and eventually fail.

With anything, mastering the fundamentals isn't very exciting, but is often the difference between someone who is successful and someone who isn't.  With the benefit of hindsight, I certainly would have spent more time working on the fundamentals of baseball if I had little league to do over again.

Project and portfolio management software, and other project management tools offer both experienced and new project managers a number of valuable tools to help them establish work management best practices and methodologies.  That being said, nothing can substitute for establishing a good work management foundation.

What are some of the fundamentals you would add to my list?