15/5/2024
“Planning is the open road to your destination. If you don’t know where you are going, how can you expect to get there?”
Basil S Walsh
INTRODUCTION
One day, you are sitting at your desk and your boss comes up to you and tasks you with leading a new project. You may immediately feel overwhelmed, like you’ve been presented with a massive mountain and now you have to figure out how to get to the top. Don’t worry – you are not alone in feeling this way and you are in the right place!
In this blog post, we will be covering the steps you need to take when you’re starting a new project, including:
Gathering Information
The first thing you want to do when you are tasked with a new project is gather enough background information. You can look at old project documentation from similar projects done by your organization as well as consulting stakeholders to see what requirements they have. You can start with internal stakeholders and then consult with external stakeholders based on your project needs. After this, you can define the project scope, objectives, and critical success factors in a document called the project charter.
Documentation is a key aspect of project initiation and will help you avoid scope creep. What is scope creep you ask? First, let’s define scope. The scope of your project is the overall objectives. Scope creep happens during the implementation of your project when people (ex. stakeholders) begin expanding the objectives of the project and add new requirements. By planning and documenting your project charter you can save yourself the headache of dealing with this later on in your project life cycle.
Project Requirements
Now that your project charter has defined the scope, you can define the specific requirements for this project. Your requirements should align with the objectives and success criteria in the charter. A fantastic way to do this is by creating a requirements traceability matrix. This will help you map any requirements back to the project’s objectives, define what is within the project’s scope, and identify anything that may be outside it. You will want to rank your project’s requirements as they are being created. This will help prioritize what needs to be done and when, and will also be helpful if your project must end sooner than you expected. At this point, you can identify any potential risks and proactively brainstorm how to mitigate them.
Making Your Plan
By now milestones and deliverables for your project should be defined. These milestones and deliverables can then be broken down into work packages. Work packages will have a group of tasks and subtasks that you can then assign to a team member. When assigning work packages, keep in mind the strengths and weaknesses of each team member and assign them packages that highlight their strengths. When assigning one work package to multiple individuals, clearly assign how involved each individual will be in the completion of the work package. You don’t want to get to the deadline only to find out that each person thought another was completing a task. Responsibilities need to be clearly defined so everyone can work efficiently.
Work packages not only help you divide up the work, but they will also help form a timeline. To do this, you must ask yourself 2 questions about each work package.
This helps prioritize your work packages and start creating your project timeline.
Communication
Your project can be planned to a tee, but unless everything is communicated with your team and other relevant stakeholders, it won’t get far. The first step in effective communication is knowing how everyone wants to be communicated with and how often. Some stakeholders may only want to receive emails and never attend meetings, and others would prefer the opposite. How often will you communicate with them? Weekly? Monthly? You need to know all of this to ensure that you are communicating effectively throughout the project. How and when you communicate may also be affected by what you are communicating about. For example, depending on how members of your team respond to emails, meetings can be set when discussing an important upcoming deadline.
Now that you know how, when, and what you need to communicate throughout your project, you also need to make sure that you’re doing so effectively and efficiently. This means no lengthy emails where people have to search for the important points. Everything should be laid out well and easy to understand. If someone has to read your email more than once to understand the important points and action items, you have not written a clear enough email.
Conclusion/Key Takeaways
After reading this blog, hopefully, that mountain your boss presented you with is seeming a bit more manageable. Know you know the steps you’ll want to take including:
Other Related Material
Written by: Maddie Burnett, BSc, MPH
