Project management best practices that actually work

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ProofHub Blog

8 min readJul 19, 2022

Have you ever wondered why so many project leaders constantly look for the best practices to achieve triumphant project management results?

Don’t fool yourself — “perfection” doesn’t exist in project management. Or does it?

What if we told you that perfect project management isn’t such a utopia? Hard to believe, right? Especially when you discover that 70% of businesses reported at least one project failure during the last year.

Achieving the highest results when you manage a project is never easy. And you can’t expect yourself to be a superhuman. If you knew where & when exactly and how to do everything so perfectly well, you’d probably be one of the superheroes from Marvel or DC comics.

But! There’s one “but” that changes everything: the development potential and opportunities for improvement in PM are endless.

You do strive for the best results, don’t you? And to achieve those, you need only the best practices that are working right here and right now.

This article will help you take advantage of the top proven practices that assist in managing projects flawlessly.

But first, let’s see why leaders and project supervisors need to bother about those anyway, shall we?

Project Management Stats & Facts that will Make You Use at Least One of the Practices Below

Want to hear some shocking truths about project management?

Here are some facts and statistics that will make you reconsider your PM methods, activities, and tools:

Out of 50,000 projects in the study, the bulk of them failed to meet at least one of the following criteria: on budget, on time, and satisfactory results.
17% of IT projects went so badly that they threatened the existence of the company.
21% of projects fail due to ineffective communication.
Only 1 in 4 companies use any type of project management software.
If it takes you less than 1 hour to decide on a project, the success rate is 68%. If the average decision time goes above 5 hours, the success rate may fall to 18%.
12% of resources get wasted due to incorrect project management.

Do you see what we’re driving at here?

You must have understood the significance of project management for your business. And even more than that. The aforementioned facts emphasize why it’s so critical to pay substantial attention to the top practices in PM that can skyrocket your endeavors as a leader.

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7 Killer Practices for Project Management to Rely on in All Cases

Are you ready to arm yourself with seven actionable tips on how to manage projects impeccably? So in!

1. Learn the project from A to Z

If you think it’s just a mere pre-work stage, you’re completely wrong. These are already the efforts taken to bring your project to the next level in the long run.

Answer these questions, in the first place:

What’s the importance of the project for your business?
What is the primary goal and what may be the tasks?
What are the expected deliverables?
What should the product/service look like when it’s market-ready?
What’s with budgeting and controlling costs?

Yet, you can’t decode the project management triangle (Time, Scope, and Cost) and other aspects all by yourself.

Who and what is going to help you do this, you wonder? The stakeholders and meeting(s) with them, of course. Start with a kick-off meeting.

2. Nail a kick-off meeting

It’s the first time the team under your guidance meets clients, investors, or sponsors. And it’s of major importance to outline cross-functional aspects, establish the groundwork for a constructive working relationship, and energize your team. Such meetings give a well-thought start, set broad-to-narrow expectations, and foster stronger team morale.

To nail it, you should write a solid kick-off meeting agenda beforehand. Prepare to talk about the scope & deliverables, responsibilities, and roles, etc. Typically, during these interactions, you cover the five W’s of strategic planning: what, who, when, where, why, and how.

With the kick-off meeting practice, you better understand and grasp the process of how the particular product development timeline is formed: from ideation to commercialization.

Meetings are “toughies” in PM. That’s a well-known fact. They may be time-consuming and take an unclear direction. But you can always learn how to plan meetings that are highly productive yet rather short.

3. Create a winning plan

How to generate a highly efficient project management plan?

The answer lies in three aspects:

Polishing details and writing a business case

Breathe out, relax, and start polishing the project plan.

When you have clarified all the points with the stakeholders and now you are certain about the project’s details, prepare a business case to use as a reference point for the before-during-after project stages.

Planning risk responses

Never bothered with a risk response strategy?

Well, you should have. To eliminate any threat that may interfere with the desirable result, add risk response planning to your to-do list.

The pitfalls may be anywhere and happen anytime. For example, when it comes to employees who work remotely. That’s when you are to face some challenges struggling to lead and coach remote teams in a risk-free manner.

Working out a plan for communicating messages

The “three whales” that help you communicate on win-win terms in PM are:

Clarity
Consistency
Speed of decision-making

Some of the questions to answer at this stage:

What methods will you use to engage with your clients and subordinates?
How often do you plan to contact them?
What tools will enable the fastest and most productive communication?
How do you plan to interact with decision-makers?

You should mind transparency, the regularity of contacts, and the cost of decision latency. More significantly, preserve professionalism in a friendly, casual way.

Plus, beware of the deadly communication mistakes to avoid.

Spoiler warning: emailing isn’t always a proper communication tool, especially when you manage web development projects. Instead choose business messaging apps which are above all fully secured, and setting them up on your servers is a good idea as well.

4. Structure and organize project resources

Here’s a listing of the most common resource breakdown structure components that can be adapted, narrowed down, or changed according to your requirements:

Human resources
Materials and equipment
Technologies and information
Locations and facilities

Have you collected all of the significant resources for the project? What about the financing resources? Like those for budget estimation, cost management, payroll, etc.?

If you have — great! But not perfect yet.

A simple list of resources won’t do any good if you just keep it for the sake of the “collection” itself.

You should plan, schedule, forecast, and optimize the entire resource lifecycle. Importantly, each project resource should be accessible in real-time to anyone who needs it.

Start Using ProofHub to Effectively Manage Your Teams and Projects!

5. Do proper scheduling

When you schedule project-related tasks, track time, and report progress, you ensure that all stakeholders are on the same page. On top of that, properly timed tasks that are completed on a priority basis help monitor advancements continuously and eliminate unnecessary expenses.

Here are some tips on how to go about scheduling in PM:

Decide on the appropriate project scheduling software with the required features for your specific project’s needs
Engage your team and clients in a scheduling process to determine tasks, their peculiarities, deadlines, costs, etc.
Establish dependencies and sequence activities
Assign resources and costs
Mention possible roadblocks
Keep a record of milestones to summarize the crucial points in the project later

Follow our pieces of advice and keep the project running like clockwork.

6. Collect feedback and analyze the performance

As a project supervisor, you’ll have to catch up with the changes and reactions to them on both sides: clients and workers’.

Gathering stakeholder feedback enables you to keep a project on track. Asking for client feedback regularly, you will:

Get a proper comprehension of limitations
Set more practical and realistic expectations
Save time & money
Reduce the risks
Prioritize tasks, and many more

By collecting employee feedback, you strengthen the employee-manager bond, foster a favorable workplace culture, and boost engagement & productivity, among other things.

How should you do that? Via check-ins, suggestion boards, video or phone calls, live chats, feedback sessions, and surveys are must-haves in your employee management system.

How to keep track of the project’s progress, gather feedback from clients and team members, and manage workflows & tasks smoothly?

One word — automation. Some hands-on apps and software can do the job for you.

7. Use tools for project managers

Did you know that automation can save you as many as 5 hours per day that are spent on repetitive tasks? While talented project managers still suffer from a key usability gap (remember the stats about 1 in 4 firms using at least any automation tool for PM?).

Automated solutions, in general, help project managers be better organized and use more methodical approaches to PM. Robust automation software and tools tackle busy work and make manual, mundane assignments a thing of the past.

Grab this extensive list of 80+ apps and tools to help you automate processes, increase the speed of decision making and enhance your managerial capacity for multitasking:

In addition, consider some vital benefits of Kanban boards to project managers.

Ready to Benefit from the Winning Practices and Become a Perfect Project Manager?

Have you ever nailed your project management strategy so greatly to call it ideal?

You might have, but again — don’t fool yourself. There’s always room for improvement.

The projects may be managed insufficiently well or so poorly that the results often cause more losses than gains. That’s why the above practices are highly beneficial for any project management framework or roadmap. Besides, they are crucial elements for organizing a project which in turn is one of the utmost business project manager responsibilities.

If you don’t want to get drowned in your projects and problems related to them, follow our guidelines on powerful project management practices, supercharge your skills and do the following:

“Expect the best, plan for the worst and prepare to be surprised.” — Denis Waitley (author of “The Psychology of Winning”).

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