Successfully completing a project is a great accomplishment for an organization. Being able to consistently deliver strong results from one project to the next is more difficult, but also vitally important to the long-term health of the business. Just one instance of poor project performance can be enough to harm a company’s financial picture, diminish its market position, or create doubt among prospective collaborators and investors. Developing the capabilities to achieve consistent success across every project—whether it’s small and routine or big and complex—is the key to operational and financial sustainability.
If you want to boost your project results across the board and develop good habits as part of those efforts, and particularly if you’re also working to execute a continuous improvement strategy within your group, then consider these five ways your team can achieve more consistent project success.
1: Formalize and document your project management workflows
Is your team one of the many that still hasn’t documented its processes in a fixed format? While it’s true that groups committed to continuously improving their performance will always be developing, assessing, and refining their workflows, you also need to record those changes if you want to consistently move projects to a successful completion. Without documentation to guide team members, your hard-won gains could be lost as people start to cut corners and fall back on old habits.
2: Standardize your technology tools.
Repeatable success is built on repeatable processes, and something as seemingly simple as the way stakeholders share information can have a huge impact on how well the team sticks to their proven workflows. By maintaining a standardized set of platforms and tools for use by all project stakeholders, you enable the group to quickly and reliably communicate and share data across diverse functional areas and dispersed team units both within and outside the organization.
3: Centralize your project data.
When stakeholders—including project team members, executive sponsors, and end users—have one place to go for the latest progress updates and budget status reports, you’re much better positioned to enjoy more consistent project results. If people struggle to find the information they need, or if the data in one system doesn’t match another, then no one has a single source of truth to guide their decision making and actions. That kind of uncertainty and inefficiency is a recipe for variable results and will lead to erratic performance over time.
4: Provide training based on a single, shared methodology.
When everyone uses the same tools and techniques to plan and execute projects, the organization can enjoy more consistent outcomes. This approach also provides the basis for continuous improvement efforts that deliver optimal results over time. And rather than making your training methodology available to only a select handful of project management professionals in your organization, offer it to all stakeholders. You’ll empower everyone to apply consistent project management principles and ensure that anyone joining your team has the knowledge to contribute to your track record of success.
5: Focus on stakeholder and end user satisfaction.
Happy customers are a byproduct of a successful project, but they can also be used to drive consistent outcomes going forward. How does it work? By putting stakeholder satisfaction at the forefront of your efforts, your project team will inherently maintain a focus on the deliverables that matter most to your customers. This becomes even more important to project success as you work to balance competing expectations across stakeholder groups, develop project scopes that fit within the organization’s budget constraints, and tackle new types of projects that are more complexity and higher risk.
PMAlliance, Inc uses a team of highly experienced and certified professionals to provide project management consulting, project management training and project portfolio management.
