IT Project Management Best Practices – Forbes Advisor – Technologist

In any IT project, there are some key stages to manage. These include:

1. Initiation

This is the initial phase where you define the overall objective of the project. During this process, you’ll likely need to hold a pre-project meeting with your IT team and other stakeholders to define what the project is looking to achieve, setting out a basic project road map, gathering feedback and ultimately achieving buy-in.

2. Planning

In this phase of the project management life cycle, it’s time to start identifying the steps you’ll take to achieve the project’s goals. While this may have been discussed briefly during the initiation phase, this will now need to become much more detailed.

Now you’ll start to break down the project into milestones, assigning roles and responsibilities to each employee, providing deadlines for each deliverable as well as the overall project, and determining an overall budget.

You’ll also want to start developing a central source of truth and documentation that employees can refer to, including a change management process. All involved teams should be made aware of how to report progress and voice concerns.

They should also be encouraged to sign all necessary documents such as nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) and requests for proposal (RFPs).

3. Execution

Once your plan is set in stone, it’s time to start executing tasks and milestones. You can now begin tracking your team’s progress. This not only includes tracking and monitoring their performance through the use of KPIs, but also whether they’re completing the necessary deliverables on time.

More broadly, you (or the IT project manager) will also be able to act as a central resource to help support employees if there are any unforeseen challenges. Support is key to ensuring ongoing risk mitigation and keeping the project within budget.

Ultimately, the success or failure of project execution rests on the ability of employees to communicate clearly about the progress of the project and any obstacles they face.

4. Closing

This is the final phase where the project and all of the underlying deliverables are finally completed. As the project comes down to an end, you’ll begin decommissioning the temporary workflows, meetings and operations you used to deliver the project, and getting all key stakeholders to sign off on the project.

You’ll also want to create a report reviewing the project’s performance. This is looking to establish whether the project concluded successfully, and if there was anything that could have been done better. It should also include a record of changes made during the life cycle of the project so you can see what improvements were made.

Together, this information will help you to learn from any mistakes made and generate insights that you can use to ensure the success of future projects.