When you set any task for yourself and achieve your goal, you don’t even think about things like planning, efficiency, resources, alignment. It all seems somehow insignificant at first sight.
What if the task would be more complicated than «to water the plants» kind (note that even here you need a certain periodicity and mandatory responsibility, because if the plants are not watered on time, they may die). Apparently, launching the construction of a large shopping mall in Moscow or even a chain of shopping malls, to organize your own media portal with plenty of articles and different categories including its own staff of editors/journalists, to launch a federal network of car service stations with the involvement of investors seems to be more complicated.
It’s not easy to go and implement it. Any manager of any enterprise will confirm that the creation and realization of a project, especially a large one, involves a huge amount of work. In fact, it is a full-fledged and very important business process. In order to implement the plan, it is necessary to make the most detailed plan, broken down into stages, to tie it to the time (set a specific deadline for each of the stages, so that there were no overlaps), to calculate and distribute resources, to appoint, and sometimes find and hire the appropriate performers, correctly set them tasks, set control points and «keep abreast» during the project lifetime.
To understand the process of planning and implementing a new project better, you need to tighten up your theoretical base first. The methodologies within each company may be different, but they all have commonalities, because tasks are still tasks everywhere. So, just in case, let’s agree on terms.
Definitions
Project creation or project implementation is a systematic process or a chain of interrelated processes that consists of certain time-bound actions aimed at achieving a given result.
Projects themselves can be part of other, more complex ones or, on the contrary, broken down into smaller ones.
Objectives may vary, they may require refinement during the course of actions or after some stages. Within a project there may be intermediate goals, etc.
The result of any project is a specific product, one unit or many. Products can be tangible or intangible. Tangible products are known as goods while intangible products are called services.
In business, sometimes the term «valuable final product» (VFP) is also used; it’s a good or service that has value both inside and outside the company. If we generalize, we can see that a project is a larger and more responsible task, often with a large number of subtasks.
That’s why the Projects section in Projecto is a kind of a hub for combining or separating entities such as Events, Tasks, Documents and Files into separate groups.
Project Implementation Plan and Stages
Every project has its own life span. In many education programs for managers/executives, the same phases of life of any type of project are highlighted. Let’s name them below.
Here are the main phases of project creation and realization:
- Concept generation (pre-project or preliminary phase). Here the goal is set and the necessity and possibility of its realization is assessed.
- Project development plan (project stages). At this stage it is important to allocate the available resources and time correctly.
- Implementation (the projects that have a long life span, this is the commissioning phase and operation itself).
- Completion of the project (its delivery, closing, extinction, etc., everything will depend on the original goals and objectives). For some projects, the completion stage is a blessing, and for some it is a disaster. For example, if the life cycle of a business comes to an end.
Within each of the stages there may be adjustments, change of course, complete abandonment of the idea, switching to a new strategy, change of priorities, etc. All possible risks can be minimized as much as possible by strengthening control and collecting analytics (obtaining qualitative and quantitative characteristics of various nested processes at control points).
On the other hand, in case of improper planning and distribution of tasks, excessive control can lead to the opposite result and ruin the system’s activity.
Special Project Management Tools Importance
Now that you have the theoretical basis, the only thing left to do is to apply it correctly in practice within your team or company.
The more complex the project, the more details need to be сonsidered. The old stone-aged method using notes in a notebook will not help at large scales.
There is a difference if you are responsible for a team of 5-10 people and need to plan a day (this is operational planning). And if you’re working with large innovative or investment project.
The market for scheduling tools has been around for a while. There are different implementations: offline programs (so-called planners), special corporate software (ERP systems, electronic document management systems, etc.), and cloud services (ready-made SaaS infrastructure).
Each type of solution has certain advantages and disadvantages.
Most classic schedulers are usually suitable only for personal use, even if all tasks are stored in the cloud and there is a ready-made mobile application.
For business, ERP systems and cloud-based project management systems are most suitable.
Corporate ERP systems are installed on users’ workstations, often requiring customization (adaptation to the needs of a particular company) and payment for implementation/maintenance services. Even if the system itself is supplied free of charge, you still have to buy a powerful server and organize all the necessary structure for it yourself (power supply, local network, backup, etc.). And this is a serious one-time financial investment. Only large enterprises can afford such systems.
The cloud-based project management systems are most favorable in terms of value for money for small and medium-sized businesses. Even if the system assumes monthly subscription. These will be operational costs, not capital expenditures, as in the case of corporate ERP. You get all the necessary infrastructure at once (without deployment and with minimal effort for implementation). The service is available from any device and at any time of day or night. Any problems are solved by support specialists, because it is included in the payment. You don’t need to search for a system administrator or сall your specialist during his vacation.
All you need to do is to choose the right service. So that it fits your technical requirements, can be easily adapted to the existing management methodology, solves all the tasks and is quickly mastered by employees.
Here we come to the most important thing!
Project Development and Realization of Rrojects in Projecto
Projecto’s features work well with project work within any size or type of business organization. It is versatile for any methodology.
What’s Hidden «Under the Hood»?
- You can divide projects into groups, for example, to emphasize topics: «Working with staff», «Working with finance», etc. The division criteria are not automatic, so you can divide projects as you like.
- Time-binding parameters are optional. If you need a clear time frame for a particular project, you can specify it (both start and end, or only start, only end).
- Project Type. A new entity does not necessarily have to be assigned to someone in an orderly manner. Employees can create their own personal project and define their own tasks in it. Other employees can be involved in a regular project, while corporate projects will be visible at once to all employees of the company registered in the system.
- You can select not only the participants within the team of the project, but also appoint a responsible person. He will have the authority to control and organize the process.
- As you work on the project, its status will change. The system provides all possible statuses (planned, in process, suspended, completed, failed, inactive, under approval).
- Auxiliary features — tags, logo (for easier visual perception and correlation), personal and general notes.
The project is realized by the involved employees within the framework of the set goals and milestones. Changes in goals and milestones become available after the project has been created. There can be any number of goals and milestones.
As For the Tasks Themselves
Tasks are the entity for the realization of any project.
- You can assign an executor and an observer or entire groups of employees in the desired status.
- You can define the place and time (start/end).
- There is a built-in system for managing reminders that can be organized for a certain interval before the assigned date, exactly on the desired date or with a specified periodicity (by day of the week or month).
- A task can easily be made periodic. Repeats are linked to days of the week, days of the month, specified time interval, etc.
- A single task can be linked to several different projects at once.
Milestones Are Independent Entities Within the Project
They can be planned for a certain period of time.
They have their own status (assigned, in process, achieved, failed, irrelevant).
A milestone can be linked to certain tasks (one or a whole list of them). Thus, a project can be divided into smaller components and intermediate stages.
Each project saves the history of events. You can attach files and notes to it.
How Do I Know When a Project Is Complete?
It is clear that the author of a project or its manager can change its status when he or she deems it necessary. But what about cases when the project involves complex business processes?
For these cases you can appoint a project committee. Then the availability of certain tasks/objectives will be determined by a group of people. The project can be closed only after all committee members have agreed on the status.
Discussion, Discussion and More Discussion….
Chat is attached to any project and to milestones. And milestones can only be achieved or failed. There’s nothing to comment on. That’s why they don’t have discussion functionality either.
Inside the chats, employees can exchange text messages, files (uploaded externally or from Projecto file storage) and notes (these are analogous to independent pages where you can place various information, images, links, lists, etc., notes can be attached to different projects and unattached from them).
Cross search will help you find items and messages that may have gotten lost in the feed, necessary files and documents.
Within the chat you can mention specific employees (they will receive a special notification) and select specific messages to reply to (to make it clear what your statement refers to).
How Do I Control the Process?
This is an important issue. It is a key function of the entire system. Projecto’s project tracking is well visualized:
- You can filter projects by status.
- Each of them can be exported in PDF or charts.
- By default, the task column is displayed as a timeline with intermediate goals highlighted. But you can switch to display it as a Gantt chart, Kanban board, or calendar chart.
- Tasks and goals can also be filtered by status, exported and searched by specific criteria.
So, all the project is at hand: everything is located in one place, clear and simple.
All you need to do is to set up a notification system to keep your finger on the pulse and not to miss an important event/event. Better yet, get notifications on your smartphone. Oh, wait, though! We have ready-made native apps for iOS and Android for just this purpose.
With Projecto it will be easy to create and realize a project, even if it is really complicated.
