Project management is the art of bringing your ambitious plans to life. And as you can tell, such a task is not a child’s play.
To succeed in project management, one has to possess a multitude of skills and competencies, and the understanding of how to build an effective project management process from scratch is paramount to them all. 🗻
To help you thrive as a project manager, we wrote this practical guide to the project management process – read it till the end to find all the information you need.
What Is the Project Management Process?
The project management process is a series of actions taken to realize your initial project idea and achieve the set project goals. And according to the PMBOK® Guide, this large-scale process can be divided into five indispensable phases or process groups:
- Initiation
- Planning
- Execution
- Control
- Closure
Let’s walk through them step by step.
5 Fundamental Phases of Every Project Management Process
1. Initiation 🛫
A strong start is one of the core factors of project success. Hence, It’s never a bad idea to dedicate enough time and effort to project initiation – “the process of formally recognizing that a new project exists or that an existing project should continue into its next phase” (PMBOK® Guide).
At this initial phase, you need to:
- Explain the strategic context of the project (i.e., a business need, importance, high-level requirements, strategic goals, etc.).
- Justify the project in terms of money and other benefits.
- Identify which things you need in order to complete the project effectively (i.e., budget, time, skills, technology and other resources).
- Outline lower-level project requirements (i.e., quality standards, deliverables, etc.)
- Define stakeholder roles and responsibilities.
The most convenient way to record all this important information is in a project charter. Once the document is created, send it for your project sponsor’s approval – the charter sign-off will mark the end of the project initiation process and indicate the start of the next project phase.
2. Planning 🧠
At this point, you will think through your entire project: What must be done to attain the set objectives and goals? How are you going to do that? Which resources do you need to work effectively? And which risks can you face on the way?
The end result of this second project phase is a comprehensive work plan, and here are some of the processes that will help you develop it:
- Scope planning – Create a clear picture of all the work that must take place throughout the course of the project. Define your performance milestones, deliverables and requirements + build a work breakdown structure to decompose the entire project scope into smaller activities and tasks that are easier to estimate, schedule and control.
- Resource planning – Build a full list of necessary project resources and figure out how you’re going to manage them. Here are some of the most vital questions to ask yourself: What type of resources do you need? How many of them do you need? How many resources do you already have? Where and how will you get the rest? How will you allocate and control your resources? Which resource planning tools will you use to ensure effective utilization?
- Activity sequencing – If your employees jump on tasks in a random order, chaos is inevitable. Hence, to foster a more organized and efficient team functioning, it’s essential to establish clear relationships between different project activities, identify task dependencies and sequence works in a logical way.
- Estimation – Figure out how much time and money should be invested in the project. Apply only proven estimation techniques + use historical data on the costs and duration of previous projects and tasks to get more accurate estimates for similar new ones.
- Budget development – Decide how much money should be invested in different project activities + how much money they will bring. Use the obtained cost estimates to justify your decisions.
- Work scheduling – Once all the task dependencies and time estimates are prepared, you can proceed to schedule your work. Set deadlines for project activities, deliverables and milestones on a visual timeline + implement an online work scheduling tool to simplify the process.
- Risk management planning – Unforeseen events and circumstances can seriously undermine your ability to complete the project. Therefore, be sure to identify and analyze all the risks to effective work + think of what you will do to prevent the worst-case scenarios from unfolding and how you will handle different types of threats.
- Quality planning – To be considered a success, your project outcomes should meet particular quality requirements. So, it’s vital to define what quality means in your unique case and indicate what your team should do to produce high-quality results: define quality standards for your project, figure out how to enforce them + pick quantifiable assessment criteria to measure the quality of outputs and ongoing works.
- Communication planning – Without smooth information-sharing, your project can easily fall apart. To keep everyone in the loop on the ongoing progress and quickly respond to new emergencies and facts, you need a thorough communication plan. It should include the details on your overall communication goals, the frequency of information-sharing, team-wide communication methods, key stakeholders and their roles.
3. Execution ⚙️
The third phase of project management is all about implementing the plans made before.
At this stage:
- You will establish a perfect project team and provide it with all the tools and resources it needs for effective and efficient performance.
- You will make certain, that your employees know what they’re supposed to do and which quality, technical, budgetary and time-related requirements they must comply with.
It’s clear that ongoing communication and collaboration have one of the primary roles in project execution, and you should dedicate special attention to them when planning your work. So, take care to research enough tools for team collaboration and communication in advance and pick the best ones for your project.
We have a brief compilation of some great collaboration software to start with – check it out!
4. Control 🔎
Project control is the ongoing comparison of actual performance results with the initial plans. It aims to identify if your team succeeds in meeting the set budgetary, quality and schedule-related objectives, detect any project overruns early on and address them promptly so everything goes back on the right track as soon as possible.
Some of the main project control processes are as follows:
- Performance reporting – It includes the collection of data on ongoing work progress + analysis of results. You can easily run this process using project management software – it contains functionality for both real-time and historical performance reporting, and it does all the complex calculations automatically. So, it makes total sense to introduce such a tool to your project team if you want to save some time and energy when running reports.
- Project scope control – This process is a combination of progress monitoring and change management. It focuses on detecting any variations in your performance requirements and environment that might lead to project overruns and force you to put more effort and resources into work than was initially planned. By detecting such risks and delays in good time, you may tackle them more effectively and keep the project scope in check.
- Cost tracking – Running out of money in the middle of the project is a project manager’s scariest nightmare. But with accurate cost tracking, it can never become a reality. Cost tracking helps you see how much money is invested in each piece of work and avert budget overruns for good.
- Time tracking – This process ensures impeccable schedule control. It shows whether your team meets the set estimates or gets stuck on particular tasks. Hence, thanks to regular time tracking, you can detect the risk of serious project delays early on and prevent them from getting worse.
5. Closure 🏁
Contract closeout and administrative closure make the essence of this last project management phase.
- The former implies the delivery of the project to the customer, who will review the final result of all your works and then decide to accept it or not.
- The latter process is about documenting your project results. You will need to analyze how effective your project was overall and record all your successes and failures – such knowledge will let you improve your decision-making and make much better project plans in the future.
Final Tip for a More Streamlined Project Management Process
From project initiation to its closure, you can take the entire project management process to a new level with the right approach and tools. And actiTIME has a plethora of valuable features to help you enhance it:
- Create as many project tasks as you wish and allocate them to employees in a trouble-free way.
- Monitor work progress any way you like – using the Kanban board, employee timesheets, visual charts or real-time reporting widgets.
- Log time manually or automatically and easily compare your actual performance to the set task estimates.
- Track staff-related costs and billable time to analyze your financial results in depth.
- Manage team absences right in your actiTIME account or integrate it with actiPLANS to improve employee scheduling and resource utilization.
- Run informative reports to get additional data for future project planning.
Sign up for a free actiTIME trial to check out these handy project management features in action and see what else it can do – there are plenty of goodies to discover!
