The first step to success in your projects is to be sure they are the right projects for you at this time. A project is "right" when it moves you closer toward achieving your long-term goals, aligns well with your unique strengths, and is achievable given the resources and people you have available to you.
Once you've identified the right project for you at this time, you need to follow a systematic process for carrying it out.
In this article, I'll show you how to develop a customized, quality process for doing your projects. First, I'll help you recognize your own unique strengths and challenges for doing projects. Then, I'll talk you through the essential elements of writing a project plan — a document you can use over and over again for any type of project.
1. Your strengths for doing projects
A customized process for doing projects begins with identifying your own unique strengths and challenges for doing projects. Knowing your own strengths and weaknesses will help you create a project schedule that is realistic for you, more accurately estimate project costs and risks, and identify the right people to bring on board to help you.
Let's say, for example, that you have an ENFP Myers-Briggs personality type — extroverted, intuiting, feeling and perceiving. Some of your project management strengths are likely your resourcefulness, willingness to take risks and ability to problem-solve creatively. Your challenges likely include attending to details, meeting deadlines and establishing a realistic project scope.
Each of these tendencies is crucial to keep in mind when you move on to your next step: creating a project plan.
2. Creating a project plan
After decades of teaching project management to both new and experienced project managers, I have honed in on what I believe to be the most effective project plan template. The project plan is adaptable to any professional or personal project and consists of five major parts: scope, tasks, risks, constraints and team rules.
As mentioned above, how you plan out each of these areas depends on your personality's strengths and weaknesses for doing projects.
In the scope section of our project plan, you spell out three major elements of your project: the objective (your goal), the boundaries (the start and end dates) and the rationale (why you're doing this project and who benefits from it).
Next, you'll need to define the project tasks. An ENFP project manager may be tempted to rush through this section, jotting down several major components of the project without specifying any deadlines. This won't do for a project plan. In this stage, you'll need to break down your project into specific task, assign them to a team member, and — most importantly — set a deadline.
The next two stages, estimating risks and constraints, are the most likely to be affected by your personality type. Simply put, if you're an optimistic kind of person, you'll likely underestimate the project's risks and constraints, while if you're more cynical, you may overestimate these.
Being honest with yourself about whether you tend toward optimism or pessimism is crucial to generating accurate estimates of project risks, resources needed and possible roadblocks.
Lastly, you must establish some team rules. Even (or maybe especially) if you see your project team as a tight-knit family, you will achieve more success with your projects if you spell out a set of rules for each and every project you undertake.
Granted, many of these rules will stay the same across projects — what matters is that you and your team revisit them each time you start on a new project, and make sure everyone is one the same page before you hit trouble.
Following a consistent process that is specifically adapted to your unique strengths as a project manager will bring you high-quality results time after time.
