11 Principles of Project Management to Guide Your Project to Success
Did you know that only 45 percent of project managers surveyed in 2021 say their organization has a track record of project success? It can be challenging to achieve everything you set out to do in a project. Scope, time, and budgetary restraints, and so many moving parts to manage, mean that road bumps should be expected. However, businesses that follow strong project management principles are more likely to meet their project objectives, stay within budget, and deliver on time, and are less likely to experience scope creep or suffer project failure.
But what are the main principles that guide best-practice project management and make such positive results more likely?
If you’re relatively new to managing projects, make sure you’re up to speed with the following 11 principles of project management before embarking on your next project:
- Viability
- Clear goals
- Clear deliverables
- Manage risk
- Clear execution strategy
- Realistic budget
- Accountability
- Cultural empowerment
- Healthy communication
- Change management
- Measurement
Just before we get into these in a little more detail, let’s remind ourselves of the main phases involved in managing projects…
What are the Main Phases in Project Management?
According to the Project Management Institute (PMI): “Project management is the use of specific knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to deliver something of value to people.” In businesses, it usually refers to the process of coordinating people, money, and resources to achieve a business goal through a well-defined scope of work, scheduling, and a series of deliverables.
Regardless of the project size or the business sector, projects generally pass through five stages. These are defined by the PMI’s Project Management Body of Knowledge as follows:
- Project initiation: this may be spurred by a particular business need, an internal request or a request from a client. In this phase, you must decide whether the project is feasible and will deliver value.
- Project planning: once the project has the “green light”, you need a project management plan to guide the execution process. Your plan should be flexible enough to address potential changing circumstances.
- Project execution: during this phase, you implement the project according to the plan and report back to stakeholders.
- Project control: the project manager must monitor the progress of tasks and promptly deal with any unforeseen issues and delays, ensuring that budgets are met as closely as possible.
- Project close: Once the project has achieved its goals, you may need to conduct a review as well as prepare final project reports for stakeholders and present your deliverables.
The Main Principles of Project Management
So, what are the core principles that should guide you when planning out a project to raise the chances of project management success?
1. Viability: Is there a business case for the project?
The first principle of project management is that before you start planning your project too intensely, conduct a feasibility study to confirm whether or not it’s viable:
- What value will it bring?
- What is the business case for the project?
- What are the benefits for the various project stakeholders?
- How will it be funded?
If the project gets the green light, you’ll need to develop a Project Initiation Document (PID). This includes the key information and requirements for a project, including project overview, deliverables, schedule, budget, risks, organization, and communication (there’s more about these in the following points).
2. Clear goals: Define project objectives
You don’t need to be a project manager to know that all projects must start with clear objectives, without which it will be impossible to gauge success levels, and projects are likely to flounder without direction.
Goals are best when they follow the S.M.A.R.T. criteria:
- Specific: The result must be clearly defined.
- Measurable: Use KPIs (key performance indicators) to quantify your goals.
- Achievable: Ensure your goals are realistic and attainable.
- Relevance: Ensure your goals align with the overall business objectives.
- Time-related: Set a specific timeframe to achieve the goal.
Say you want to increase the amount of traffic your website receives. A good example of a S.M.A.R.T. goal would be:
Increase web traffic by 20 percent in the next five months by hiring an SEO team to improve content rankings.
It’s relevant to the overall business goal (increasing revenues) and is specific, measurable, achievable, and time-related.
3. Clear deliverables: Define your project deliverables
The Project Management Institute defines deliverables as “any unique and verifiable product, result, or capability to perform a service that is produced to complete a process, phase, or project.”
Once you’ve established your project goals, the deliverables help you achieve them. The deliverables for the previous example of a S.M.A.R.T. goal might be sourcing a stellar SEO team or developing 25 pieces of high-quality content around targeted keywords, for instance.
4. Manage risk: Assess and minimize threats to the project
In any project, things can and (likely) will go wrong, with the potential to adversely affect the deliverables and the overall success of your project.
Identifying the main threats (and prioritizing their potential severity) will help you create a risk mitigation strategy and address the threats if they do arise. For instance, you can prepare fail-safes, schedule buffers, and team backups to help anticipate and prepare for risks.
Risk assessment should be conducted using historical data and brainstorming/observations/experience of your team during the planning stages of the project, but also after it’s underway. New risks can emerge as the project progresses and can still derail it unless you’re suitably prepared.
5. Clear execution strategy: Identify stages and milestones
If you’ve already set S.M.A.R.T. goals, this project management principle should be easier to address.
After you’ve prepared your project execution strategy, you might arrange a project kick-off meeting to begin the execution stages.
Here, you can share the vision and the stages of the project plan, allocate resources/delegate tasks, set deadlines, priorities, and milestones. This will keep the team focused on the big picture, help them determine if they are on track, and get clear on the expectations of their roles and responsibilities (see point 7).
Then, team members can begin executing the project in line with the plans you’ve detailed.
6. Realistic budget: Commit to a project budget
With any business project, it’s important to set a realistic budget and commit to it or, if there is some flexibility built in, understand the allowable budget range.
Depending on the project, there are likely to be some unexpected expenses, for which you’ll need to build a margin. Unexpected delays can also add expense to the project.
However, during the planning stages, you should have assessed risk and identified some of the “danger” areas and made plans to mitigate extra costs.
7. Accountability: Ensure roles/responsibilities are defined
As mentioned above, project managers must clearly define each team member’s role and responsibilities to avoid confusion, conflict, and “passing the buck”.
RACI charts can be used to organize your team, track primary project tasks and milestones, and ensure that everyone is aware of what they are responsible for and who they report to:
- Responsible: Who is responsible for the task?
- Accountable: Who will delegate and review the task before it’s determined to be complete?
- Consulted: Who will you consult with about how current tasks affect future tasks?
- Informed: Who needs to be informed about the overall project progress?
This will provide clarity and accountability for team members.
Throughout the project, you may need to revisit these definitions and ensure that everyone remains on the same page.
8. Cultural empowerment: A positive working environment
The RACI method described above will help you define roles and responsibilities, but, for projects to work best, a culture of empowerment, openness and positivity is important.
A positive workplace promotes innovation, creativity, growth, quality, and positive project outcomes. This is highly motivational for a project management team and is not possible if team members are not empowered or feel threatened if they make mistakes.
If your people are constantly micro-managed, they’ll be reluctant to speak up and problem-solve – and that’s not a culture conducive to running successful projects.
9. Healthy communication: A strong communication plan
Implementing an open communication policy from the start of your project will help keep all stakeholders (internal and external) informed of progress and will promote cooperation and help prevent misunderstandings, conflicts, and delays.
Decide on the primary communication channels you’ll use (email, SMS, video meetings, scrums, Kanban board, chat etc.) and the types of information that should be communicated. Also, set some guidelines for the frequency of your communications.
In healthy projects, all team members should be able to easily access all relevant data and tools to aid efficiency, as well as ask questions and provide input as required through open and consistent communication.
Customer or client feedback may also be a necessary part of your project strategy.
10. Change management: A process to address unexpected challenges
During the execution phase of a project, errors and mistakes may occur or circumstances change and threaten “scope creep”: that’s the gradual expansion of a project’s scope beyond its original goals and objectives, without a corresponding increase in time, budget, or resources.
Managing this requires some flexibility to address new challenges as they arise. You may even need to “pivot” on project strategy, scope and/or budget as necessary.
It’s easier if you have already created a plan for an approval process for change requests before the project began. If so, you’ll simply need to track and document the necessary changes and follow the approval process before implementing them.
11. Measurement: Set performance baselines and track project progress
You should measure your team’s performance to understand how the project is progressing, maintain accountability, and determine whether there will be a successful outcome.
If you’ve set S.M.A.R.T. goals, you should already have some key metrics to measure, and these should be quite obvious. Measure milestones and deliverables against the original targets/ KPIs to decide if you’re on track for project success.
KPIs usually relate to elements such as quality, timelines, scope and budgets. These are performance “baselines” that determine the minimum expectations.
If you’re falling short in any of the KPIs you set, monitoring early and often will help you and your team improve performance as you go along. If team members are performing well beyond expectations, make sure they’re suitably acknowledged and rewarded.
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Increase the chances of project success
Project managers must often “spin many plates” at the same time. No two projects are the same, but by following the core project management principles outlined above, you’ll be geared for success from the start.
Of course, managing projects is easier with the right software.
Kanbanchi is a Kanban board-based project management tool that brings multiple remote teams together, improves communication and collaboration among them, and documents/reports on project outcomes for informed decision-making.