Project Management Success
What is keeping you from getting your project done?
by Lenka Davis
What do you want to accomplish today? You want to feel successful, you want to achieve something, or you want to help people. To get there you need to get things done. And of course done right.
Wikipedia defines project management as the “process of leading the work of a team to achieve goals and meet success criteria at a specified time.” PMI.org defines it as “ the application of knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to project activities to meet the project requirements.” In the case for startups the team can be one or a few people.
You work on your first priority, however, there are all sorts of reasons that keep you from getting it done. There is too much to keep in your head with dates and times. And even though we have a lot of technology at our fingertips we all know projects take time and there are only a certain number of hours per day. For startups, you need to evaluate your customer or company needs daily or weekly what you are doing based on the latest needs. Or you are just grappling with what scrappy and organic marketing you need to do today.
The benefits of having a project manager and a tool to help you with managing your business projects are many. It’s a must for success. They allow you to focus and be efficient. They give you room for creativity, brainstorming and being able to handle urgent or unexpected tasks. And best of all it’s never too late to start (just like doing physical exercise).
Project managers help you get started and organized. Tools will help you keep track of all the moving parts and priorities. Below are four main steps to getting any project started.
Steps to success:
List tasks in one place
Clear your mind
Organize
Prioritize
1. List tasks in one place
Based on how long you think your list of tasks are and your preference of doing this on paper or electronically, pick one place to hold your list. The key criteria is to be able to move all the tasks around, thus the use of stickies will work if you like to write on paper, and then you will be able to edit your tasks either into small doable chunks or combine a few that make sense to do together. You want to pick one place to put them all, because as you add more items to your list you will see what else you have to work on. You can then create groups of items to be efficient, or prioritize or delegate to your team members.
2. Clear your mind
Well, not by meditation you can do that too, but more about making some space to think. Trust me, it feels good and scarry to see everything you need to do written down all in one place. So to empty your mind of all the tasks you want or need to do, write it down either in a spreadsheet, on a bunch of stickies on a board or an easy to use free online tool such as Trello. This initial and ongoing list of tasks is called your backlog of items, based on the popular Agile methodology of managing projects. If you are a software developer or work in technology with a team you may already be using one of the many tools out there built to implement the Agile methodology for managing projects. Using any tool that works is great. We find that early stage startup founders have a lot on their to-do list and still could benefit from the power of an Agile tool and a project manager to run the project. See our list of free tools below.
3. Organize
Organize your tasks in logical groupings. In the Agile methodology teams use a metric named Story Points. Atlassian defines story points as “units of measure for expressing an estimate of the overall effort required to fully implement a product backlog item or any other piece of work.”
It’s a t-shirt size
Your first thought might be that story points could be the hours it will take to complete the task, however, a better way is to assign each task a size. You can think of it as a t-shirt size of small, medium, large and extra-large. As teams use these sizes they get better at estimating them. The issue with using dates and hours is that it does not include how hard that task or problem might be to solve, it does not include non-project related work like meetings and emails, for example, and any emotional attachment to dates is removed by using sizes. If a task is larger than a “large” then it needs to be broken down into smaller tasks.
One way of estimating the size of a task when using Agile methodology. Story Points can be thought of as t-shirt sizes.
4. Prioritize
This is the key to your success! Setting a priority to each task allows you to see at one glance what you need to work on next, what small task you can get started or done between big tasks and the estimated effort everything takes. It eliminates decision fatigue and allows teams to have transparency with what everyone is working on, or even what you are working on if you are a team of one. Prioritizing tasks will help you manage your time and get the important and critical tasks done.
Tools
If you have tried to search for a project management tool to use, you know there are so many tools out there. We have made a list of free and easy to use tools that can get any team or novice started. You are also welcome to use spreadsheet, cloud based docs or sticky notes to get started.
Free online project management tools
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Unlimited members and cards
Up to 10 boards with free version
Easy to learn and use, good for teams new to Agile style projects
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Free for 5 users
Simple to share task list for small teams
Cloud storage and desktop and mobile apps
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Free for 20 users
Tailor made for freelancers, students, families and personal projects
3 projects and 1 GB of storage with free version
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Free for 15 users
Unlimited projects and messages
Unlimited file storage
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Free for 5 team members
100MB storage with free version
Unlimited workspaces and tasks
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Free for 2 team members (after the 14 day free trial)
500 MB of storage
Up to 1000 items
Fun Fact
The building of the Hoover Dam in 1931 was the first project that used project management tools in the form of a scheduling diagram designed by Henry Gantt called a Gantt chart. A Gantt chart is a type of bar chart, with bars on their side, that shows the project schedule. A Gantt chart lists the tasks to be done on the vertical axis and the time intervals on the horizontal axis. They were considered revolutionary when introduced around 1910 - 1915. In the 1980 with the introduction of the personal computer, complex Gantt charts became a common feature in web based applications. In 1999, Gantt charts were identified as "one of the most widely used management tools for project scheduling and control".
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Lenka Davis is a Managing Partner at Fly to Soar. She has worked in marketing, managing projects and building tools in the high-tech industry for Fortune 100 companies and also ran her own business. Follow Lenka and the Fly to Soar Team on Instagram @flytosoarcompany