Not every company or team has a formal project management process. Whether you work at a large organization or a fast-growing startup, formal project management may not be something your team has prioritized yet. But now, you’re finding it increasingly difficult to stay organized and collaborate with teammates. You might be wondering if you need project management—except, that’s just a thing for teams with dedicated project managers, right? Show
Well, maybe not. At Asana, we think project management skills help teams complete projects more efficiently. Finding a way to plan, manage, and execute work is relevant for every team and company. And while you may not need every piece of a traditional project management system, your team could still benefit from some of the fundamental parts of project management. What is project management?Project management helps teams organize, track, and execute work within a project. Think of a project as a collection of tasks to accomplish a specific goal. Project management can help your team plan, manage, and execute your work in order to meet your project’s requirements on time. With a project management tool, your team can organize all of the details of your work in one place, share feedback and progress, and, ultimately, collaborate more effectively. Cut project time in half with Asana Instead of shuffling between spreadsheets, email, and other tools to juggle all of your work, a project management tool helps your team:
The history of project managementProject management developed from the convergence of several different types of engineering in the early 1900s, but the tools and techniques that define modern project management didn’t begin emerging until the 1950s. At that point, project management started becoming a distinct, recognizable methodology—most frequently applied towards engineering projects. In 1969, the Project Management Institute (PMI) was officially formed, and the organization played a large role in defining and solidifying project management over the next several decades. In addition to offering certifications for project managers, the PMI published the first ever Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (the PMBOK guide) in 1996, which they update regularly. Historically, the project manager was a dedicated employee—frequently trained in project management methodologies and toolsets, and often certified by organizations like the PMI. To run a project management process, you needed a project manager—because project management tools were difficult to set up and use, and often required unique expertise. Modern project management is different. Instead of complex certifications and hard-to-understand jargon, today, anyone can be a project manager. In fact, at Asana, we think if you manage a project—any project—you’re a project manager. The flexibility and democratization of project management is due in large part to improved, modern project management software. Instead of clunky, hard-to-navigate tools, modern project management is flexible, visual, and made for you—instead of the other way around. The A-B-Cs of modern project managementThere are a lot of project management terms and jargon, but it isn’t as complicated as it might first seem. If you’re just getting started, or if you want to know what your coworker means when they call something an Agile methodology or talk about a project’s scope, here’s a breakdown of the types, components, processes, and team roles within project management. Cut project time in half with Asana Types of project managementProject management is a way to help your team track all of the work being done in order to meet a project’s requirements on time. But within the broad category of project management, there are additional types, methodologies, and approaches, including:
Core components and key termsThere isn’t one defined checklist of every component within project management. Mostly, that’s because there are different types of project management—each with their own components, processes, and formats. But in general, whatever project management methodology or tool you use will include: BudgetMost projects will have a budget that will restrict and define what you can accomplish during your project. DeliverablesThe deliverables are the assets, files, or products you will have finished at the end of your project timeline. Deliverables can include ads for a brand campaign or new features for a product launch. DependenciesYour project may also have dependencies, which happen when one task can’t begin until another task is completed. If your project has a lot of dependencies, you might benefit from a Gantt chart-style view so you can visualize your work in a timeline. MilestonesMilestones are checkpoints that signify when a group of work is completed or a new bucket of work is launched. Unlike deliverables, which represent a product or result, a milestone is a moment in time. Read: How to set, achieve, and celebrate project milestonesProgress and status updatesAs you manage your project, you’ll need to send progress reports and status updates to project stakeholders. Good reporting can increase cross-functional visibility and collaboration. Read: How to write an effective project status reportProject planA project plan is a blueprint of the key elements your team needs to accomplish in order to successfully achieve your project goals. Read: Create a better project plan in just 7 stepsProject riskProject risks are anything that might go wrong in your project—like going over budget or missing your due date. Project risk management is the practice of identifying risks before getting started on a project, so you can best prevent them. This entails creating a risk register. Project scopeDuring the planning process, you’ll also define your project scope—which is the size, limitations, budget, and goals of your project. Knowing your project scope can prevent scope creep, which occurs when your project deliverables and work exceeds your project scope. Resource management planA resource management plan is a plan for how you’re going to allocate your team’s resources—whether that’s employee bandwidth, technical tools, or budget. Creating a resource management plan for your project can help you best manage and schedule your team resources, so you can maximize resource availability. Read: What is resource leveling? (Techniques and examples)Smart goalsEvery project should have a defined goal or objective. As you outline your project goals, use the SMART goal framework to ensure you have clear metrics and criteria so you can accurately measure project success. StakeholdersProject stakeholders are anyone involved in your project. This can be cross-functional team members or executive leadership. TimelineMost projects will have a timeline—a start date, when work is kicked off, and an end date, when work is completed. Read: How to create a project timeline in 7 stepsProject management processEvery project will vary slightly, depending on what you’re working on, what team you’re on, and how your team members like to collaborate. But in general, there are five main project phases that occur during the project management process:
FAQ: What about projects that are ongoing?The best way to manage an ongoing process, like a bug tracking or creative request project, is with work management. Project management is actually a part of work management—but while project management can help you coordinate individual projects, work management software is built to help teams manage both discrete projects and processes that have no beginning or end date. Read: Work management vs project management: what’s the difference?5 benefits of project managementIf you’re still on the fence about whether or not you need project management, read on to discover the benefits of project management, along with a few simple ways to bring these ideas to your team’s way of working—no fancy degree or certification course required. Cut project time in half with Asana 1. Clear, organized plans improve team collaborationIf you’ve ever leapt into a project without a plan, you know how messy things can get right from the start. You might end up skipping essential steps in your project schedule, scrambling to complete a forgotten task at the last minute, or answering the same logistical questions over and over again: “When’s this due? What are we doing next?” Worse, the quality of your work might suffer as you rush to push your project across the finish line. Instead of writing the plan as you go, map out everything that needs to get done, along with task owners, deliverables, and due dates, before starting your project. Then, visualize your project to-dos in a timeline or categorized list to clearly outline who’s doing what by when. For example, if you’re planning an event, you might list each individual step leading up to the main event, who’s responsible for each step, and how far in advance you need to complete the steps. Then, schedule them on a shared project calendar. This way, you’ll avoid rushing to order last-minute invites or having two teammates book two separate caterers (whoops!). Read: Create a better project plan in just 7 stepsBy outlining a clear plan with all of your project to-dos, then adding deadlines, task owners, and other essential details, you’ll turn what would have otherwise been a chaotic and wasteful execution process into an efficient one. You’ll have a clear idea of the scope and timing of your work, and can spot potential conflicts before you’ve even started. With just a bit of forethought and planning, you’ll be able to waste less time and resources—and who doesn’t want that? Tips for planning projects
To successfully manage a project, you need to prioritize. You’ll never have as much time and resources as we’d all hope for, so to do it all you need to focus on the items that will have the most impact. Then make sure these priorities are clear to stakeholders so you can set expectations and to your team so they focus on the right work.”—Corri Skinner, Executive Director, Client Success for Vox Creative at Vox Media 2. Defining everyone’s role eliminates confusionOnce the prep work is done, it’s on to the actual management part of project management. However, without a clear project owner to help your team across the finish line, it’s all too easy for teammates to drop tasks, forget details, or not know who to go to with questions. Read: How to effectively manage your team’s workloadWhile companies with a formal project management function will have a Project Manager to make sure project plans are going according to, well, plan, those without one often let these responsibilities fall on the person leading or initiating the project. For example, if you’re an editor publishing a new series of articles, a developer orchestrating a website migration, or an account manager updating their client reporting systems, you’re also likely the one coordinating all the moving pieces of your project. Fortunately, you don’t have to take on a second job to manage your project effectively—a little communication and collaboration can go a long way. By making it clear to others that you’re the point person for your project, everyone else involved will know who to go to with questions and to look to for updates. And by outlining everyone else’s role in the project, you’ll eliminate confusion on how you want your teammates to be involved. Tips for managing projects
With Asana, we’ve become more collaborative overall. There’s one project and everybody’s on it. It’s not like Dalton has his own project for the same thing. It feels like all of us own this one thing together.”—Julia Bersin, Senior Manager of Demand Generation at Guru 3. Well-defined goals improve team effectivenessProjects aren’t successful when teams don’t know what their project goals are. Without clear goals, teams not only lack intrinsic motivation—they also run the risk of working towards the wrong objective or toiling away at low-impact work. With a project management tool, you define your project goals up front. That way, everyone working on the project is aligned on the project goals—and can optimize for the steps they need to take to get there. For example, if your project is to launch a new product, you might set a goal to “Drive a 20% increase in upgrades.” This goal would in turn influence your launch decisions as you go. It would also serve as a metric to measure success after the launch. The individuals on your project team will benefit too. By ensuring you’ve really thought through the problem you’re trying to solve and giving your team a “north star” to align on, you’ll keep your team focused on tasks that will make an impact on these goals—rather than getting lost on unnecessary work. Tips for setting project goals
Asana allowed us to see the overall amount of work that we were actually doing, and then it allowed us to be able to reprioritize and re-strategize the types of work that we were doing.”—Carla De Ciccio, Content Strategist, Telfer School of Management 4. Defining a communication plan keeps your team aligned and focusedThe term may be project “management,” but managing a project is only one piece of the puzzle. Before you even get started on work, you should align on a communication plan. Your team likely has an email management tool, an instant messaging tool, and a project management tool, among others. A communication plan establishes when each tool should be used. For example, at Asana, we use email for external communication, Slack for quick internal messages, and Asana for all of our actionable work. The average employee switches between 10 tools per day. When you don’t have an established plan for which tool should be used when, switching between those tools can vary from confusing to completely overwhelming. A communication plan reduces decision fatigue and makes sure every team member is on the same page. Tips for creating a communication plan
By getting requests out of email and using Asana to collaborate more effectively, we’re able to save 60 hours a month and now spend that time on strategy instead of managing all the disparate pieces.”—Walter Gross, Senior Digital Marketing Manager at Sony Music 5. Project management tools help increase efficiencyTo put these tips into action, consider using a project management tool to help your team better collaborate and stay on track. While there are literally dozens of tools you could choose from, you’ll want to avoid looking at more traditional project management tools since most of these tools are built for more traditional processes and can take a lot of time to set up and onboard. Instead, look for something that’s easy to adopt, flexible, and customizable. Bonus points if you’re able to connect work across projects (which can be hard to do in email and spreadsheets) and communicate with teammates where the work is happening. Read: 9 ways to improve your team’s efficiency at workObviously, we think Asana fits the bill and is a great option for companies who want to get a jump start on better project management with a tool that’s both easy to adopt and has the features your team needs to be successful. Tips for using a project management tool
My number one project management tip is to always reflect after a project. Then you can take everything you learned and create a playbook so you’re ready the next time you need to plan and manage a similar project.”—Kerry Anne Hoffman, Senior Project Manager, Marketing Operations at ClassPass I want to become a project manager, now what?Congrats—you’re a project manager! No really, that’s all it takes. When project management first emerged, there were strict training and certifications you needed in order to be considered a “project management professional.” But that has changed over the past several decades, due in large part to the democratization and expansion of current team roles. Originally, you needed a project manager to “run” your projects—but as more team leads began running their own projects, project management has transitioned from a profession to a skill. Modern project management tools are made with this shift in mind. At Asana, we believe that anyone can be a project manager. If you work on a team, and your team works on projects, you can be a project manager—without having to learn the ins and outs of a new tool. You just need a tool that’s built for you—not the other way around. Read: Everything you need to know to become a project managerProject management toolsProject management tools are a visual way to gain clarity and connect with your team. Think about how your team currently manages work. If you don’t share a project management tool, your team’s projects, tasks, files, and communication are likely scattered across tools, which reduces team visibility and alignment. Without a central source of truth, team members don’t have clarity on what their priorities are, and they likely spend a lot of time searching for answers. In fact, according to the Anatomy of Work Index, we spend 60% of our time every day on work about work—things like searching for documents, chasing approvals, and attending meetings—instead of skilled or strategic work. With an online project management tool, you have a better way for communicating priorities and aligning on who’s doing what by when. To help teams provide clarity, project management tools offer several different ways to visualize your project work in real time. Cut project time in half with Asana Kanban boardsKanban boards are a visual way to plot out your project progress. In a Kanban board, progress is represented by vertical columns, and tasks move through each stage until they’re complete. A typical Kanban board might have columns for New, In progress, and Completed work. Gantt chartsGantt charts are horizontal bar charts used to visualize a project’s timeline. In a Gantt chart, tasks are represented as horizontal bars, where the length of the bar represents how long the task is going to take. CalendarsProject calendars are a great way to make your tasks come to life and clearly visualize your upcoming week or month’s tasks. Project calendars are popular views for projects that have many different tasks with unique due dates, like editorial calendars or social media content calendars. Spreadsheet-style listsIn a spreadsheet-style view, you can gain clear, at-a-glance insight into who’s doing what by when. In this type of visual project management, you can clearly view your project workflow in a linear, grid-like view. What about work management tools?We mentioned work management software earlier, because work management is the umbrella under which project management falls. With project management, you have great tools to organize, plan, and deliver your projects. But work management doesn’t just help you with a single project process—instead, it helps your team get a holistic view of how all of your projects and initiatives connect. There are two main work management tools that do that, in addition to the four common project management views we listed above. Project portfolio managementProject portfolio management is the secret to monitoring all of your initiatives in one place. Portfolios provide a bird’s-eye view into all of your work, so you can keep your team on track across projects. They allow you to connect everyday business with corporate strategy. Workload managementWith workload management, you can get a clear picture of your team’s work and capacity to ensure no one is burning out or getting bored. That way, you can spot potential overwork and adjust tasks if needed. Experience the benefits for yourselfNo matter what company or industry you work in, your team will benefit from adopting a few project and work management basics. Even a few simple changes to how you plan, manage, and report on your work can make your team more efficient, accountable to their work, and confident that they’re tackling the things that matters most. Cut project time in half with Asana How does tracking and measuring progress benefit?Why Measuring Progress is Important. Measuring progress to your goal lets you see whether you've made a dent, are at a standstill, or have fallen behind. This information is useful in helping you to make or adjust a plan of action for getting on track. Your measurements act as your guide toward reaching your goal.
Which items should you track throughout the project execution phase?Project costs.. Key tasks and activities.. Project goals.. Progress toward milestones.. Action items.. Project schedule.. Why it is important to monitor progress during a project?The importance of project monitoring
These steps are essential to ensure that everything is going as planned. By monitoring the proper execution of the various project tasks, the work and results of your collaborators, you ensure that your team is effective and that the defined objectives are achieved.
Which tracking method is most useful when project managers need a way to track big milestones in a project?The Gantt chart is one of the most popular ways to track your project's progress. It gives project managers and team members a visual representation of progress in real-time.
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