Imagine a project where everyone understands everything, time is used effectively, the project team is ready to face any hurdle, and progress tracking runs smoothly.
Every team leader’s dream, right?
To achieve this, you must align all the ideas, assets, and processes with the success criteria as early as possible. In project management, we call this project design, covering the project’s goals, structure, resources, and deliverables.
But how do you build the best project design — and put an end to your disappointing project streak? Keep scrolling to find out!
Table of Contents
1. Establish project goals and tasks
All projects need clear and measurable goals, resulting in benefits such as:
- Sense of direction and purpose,
- Improved leadership and motivation,
- Effective communication, and
- Better decision-making.
Each project is unique in a way, but you always need to specify which problem you aim to solve, see how you can best meet stakeholder needs, and create a project timeline to ensure balanced efforts and timely completion.
Precise goals facilitate task planning. The first step here is to identify the main tasks required to reach the project goals, after which they can be divided into subtasks if needed.
Set clear deadlines, as well — otherwise, projects can drift, leading to decreased productivity and lost revenue.
Time limits will also help you prioritize tasks, enhancing focus and motivation.
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For more about documenting and managing stakeholder needs to meet project objectives, check this out:
2. Assess risks
A project risk is anything that could affect the outcome of a project. So, the sooner you think of any potential issues or fluctuating parameters, the easier it is to find ways to handle them or avoid them altogether.
Naturally, your risk register will evolve and become more detailed as the project implementation progresses, but some matters can be listed even in the earliest stages — for instance:
- Type of risk,
- Likelihood,
- Potential impact, and
- Mitigation strategies.
All stakeholders should know the risks and their role in mitigating them. The importance of communication and collaboration is pronounced in all project phases, and in this case, it helps recognize and tackle risks more efficiently.
Don’t hesitate to voice your concerns as they might spark other colleagues’ imagination, resulting in several potential solutions.
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If you want to learn more about improving project success chances via prediction of uncertainties, read this:
3. Allocate resources
Another important step is resource allocation. This covers people, materials, and budget.
Each activity needs an owner to boost accountability. Successful task delegation means considering everyone’s skills and availability when distributing assignments among team members.
So, when assigning tasks, provide clear instructions and assure your teammates that you can offer additional support.
Depending on the project, you may also need various physical resources, such as products, machinery, office space, etc. Keep all that in a list to ensure good organization and accuracy.
Having in mind all the activities, people, equipment, and other resources involved in your project, you must also determine the budget.
There are different project budgeting methods for getting a budget estimate, but since it’s difficult to be completely accurate in this prediction, set some extra funding aside for emergencies.
4. Specify project deliverables
A deliverable, as the name suggests, is whatever (in)tangible output you promise to deliver within a project. This can be a:
- Product (a software application, a 3D model of a building, a piece of furniture, etc.),
- Document (a strategic plan, a marketing strategy, research reports, etc.), or
- Service (a training program, IT consulting, event organizing, etc.).
Similarly to project goals, you define deliverables by learning what project stakeholders need and expect of you. That has to be crystal clear for your team to divide and carry out the work.
Just like other tasks, deliverables need specific due dates, owners, and priorities.
Moreover, making a deliverable a success isn’t only a matter of meeting deadlines — the receiving party should be fully satisfied, prompting them to want to work with you again. Deliverable quality review methods are, therefore, a must.
The more thoroughly you define everything we mentioned here, the easier it will be to implement effective deliverable tracking later on in the project.
5. Decide on the monitoring procedure
Project monitoring essentially means seeing if everything specified in the project design phase follows the plan.
The choice of project management methodology influences the monitoring procedure.
Each method has its principles and practices — certain approaches prioritize iterative progress tracking, some revolve around visual management, others emphasize detailed documentation and milestone tracking, etc.
Some of the most widely used PM methodologies are:
Whatever the method, progress tracking involves:
- Updating task statuses,
- Tracking project expenses,
- Using visual tools when helpful,
- Maintaining regular team communication,
- Monitoring Key Performance Indicators (KPIs),
- Compiling project documentation, and
- Analyzing results and improving processes where possible.
Nowadays, the easiest way to follow project progress is to use centralized project management software, allowing the whole team to be on the same page at all times and quickly check for updates.
Create the best project design with Plaky
Building a solid project design requires careful planning and attention to detail, so you should look for a PM tool that can fully support your needs. If a powerful yet simple and affordable solution sounds good to you, consider Plaky.
Our tool can make project design easy regardless of your industry or company size. Through virtual spaces and boards, Plaky offers unlimited users, projects, tasks, and files even in its free plan.
Thanks to versatile customizable fields, you can also specify all the details of your projects or tasks.
Should any of the specific task information get updated, the task cards conveniently show a record of all changes (time and author of the change, previous value, new value, and more), and people subscribed to the item get notified.
To save time, use Plaky’s project management templates — software development, marketing, HR, and many more categories are available and can be altered to fit your case better.
In addition, Plaky’s interface is colorful and intuitive, with a responsive design for access anywhere (browser, mobile, or desktop).
Choose from a variety of pricing plans to find what works best for your organization. The Free Forever version is great, but many teams have gone from functional to absolutely thriving by using Plaky’s extra functionalities.
For instance, the widely used Gantt chart gives you a comprehensive view of tasks and lets you stay in the loop regarding what’s coming up next, potential bottlenecks, overlapping activities, and more. And in Plaky, you are just one click away from the Gantt view!
What’s more, paid plans give you access to other useful hacks, including:
- Bulk actions to prevent repetitive manual work,
- Conditional item/field coloring for enhanced data visualization,
- Unlimited Activity log to never lose track of changes, and more.
Get a taste of how seamless project management can be and try Plaky for free today.
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