3 Keys to Simplify Project Management
Project Management can seem overwhelming, especially what tool to use and when. The MPM (Manager Project Management) model is a view all of the project pieces essential to delivering a successful project.
Sure, there are some great web tools now for creating, sharing, and managing your project. But if you don’t have all of the pieces you need and launch your project incorrectly, no tool, however sexy, shiny, or new is going to help you get your project done or inspire your team.
Project Management Strategies and Tools can be Overwhelming
You still have to lead the team. You still have to control what the project creates and how it spends money. And you still have to manage and adjust the plan.
You need simple strategies and tools and that start with a simple model for all of the pieces you need to manage your project.
Start With a Strong Foundation
As a manager, managing a project on the side is just one of your jobs. So, you have to figure out how to simplify it, make it easier to do, have it use less of your time, all while still allowing you to deliver the excellence expected of you and you expect of yourself?
Simple PM Strategies created a model to help you understand all the pieces you need and how all of the pieces fit together, when to use them, and hopefully in a format that makes the pieces easier to remember.
Foundational Questions
The model starts with the foundational questions that you learned in school (and maybe began to detest) that you start with whenever there is something important to understand for which you need to create foundational knowledge to build upon.
Those foundational questions are Why? Who? What? How? Where? When?, with one twist: How is actually “How Much”.
The PM Model Starts with the Foundational Questions
Foundational Questions for Project Management
Getting into more Project Management detail, we add in the project management Pieces to answer the questions from a project perspective for each one of the labels.
- Why = Motive: purpose, description, assumptions, constraints, risks
- Who = People: roles, team, organization, stakeholders, communications, adoption
- What = Outcomes: objectives, requirements, scope, deliverables, testing, quality, earned value for outcomes
- How Much = Financials:CAPEX, OPEX, budget, procurement, earned value for financials
- Where = Map (or Path): methodology, approach, earned value for the plan
- When = Timing: timelines, milestones, schedule
You owe it to yourself to start with a strong foundation. For each project detail piece above, put at least one sentence down to either rule it out or frame what you know or don’t know about it. Just one statement to start with.
Foundational Questions in a Model
Most Projects are late and over budget, they don’t achieve what they set out to do, and this is stressful and costly.
It’s time to change that by making sure that when we are doing Project Management, we use a simple model to remind us of those fundamentals.
A simple model of the fundamentals
Then extend that model to help us know what actions we have to do, and when, on a consistent basis. Daily and weekly habits of simple strategies and tools create predictable project success.
Now Add in Project Management Context
The next blog, the second one in this series, covers applying the context of project management to these questions.
We need to interpret the fundamentals from the perspective of a project and how the project manager applies the questions to the discipline of project management.
Understanding these broad fundamental knowledge questions from the context of project management then lead us to the appropriate items for managing a project which is covered in the third blog post in this series.
Summary
Knowing what project management strategies and tools to use at what point can seem overwhelming and hard to remember, especially given all of the other management responsibilities a manager is faced with.
Looking at project management from a simplified model, like the MPM model, and start with first asking what fundamental knowledge is needed to manage a project successfully can help to see that the critical project pieces are really just answering foundational knowledge questions, only from a project management perspective.
Once we have the pieces defined, then we can extend that model to help us know what actions we have to do, and when, on a consistent basis.
Action Steps / Apply This Knowledge
- Think of the fundamental questions from a project perspective and ask yourself, which project management items do you regularly create and which of the 6 buckets they fit best in?
- Ask yourself, which one of the 6 buckets you might spend the most time in or the most time creating items for, and which ones draw a blank because you don’t spend as much time thinking about items related to that fundamental question.
- Try to put just two sentences for each question down and see what it reveals to you about your scope, schedule, and cost.
- Prompt engineering guidance for AI GPTs such as chatGPT: “I’m a business leader launching a project whose purpose is Y, and delivering X. What are some items or project management pieces I need to define and gather knowledge on before I get started?”
Learn More to Do More
Business evolves through change initiatives otherwise known as projects. The key to managing these change initiatives so you have more time, and less stress is to use simple strategies and tools.
Check out the Learning Hub’s other Articles with Actionable Steps, organized with a busy leader in mind, by topic or main idea, and with some AI GPT (e.g. ChatGPT) prompt engineering suggestions under the Action steps: https://simplepmstrategies.com/learning-hub-index
MPM - 5Ws and How
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