How to make a Project Plan Work?

You may know how to write a project plan. Okay, so it’s the day of the execution, and all the elements have come together, and it’s really happening. So where do you put your head? Where do you put yourself in the big mix of things? Execution is where the rubber meets the road for project leaders and their teams. We‘ve heard people say that no plan survives its first contact with reality. So in order to ensure that the team has the best chance for success during the execution phase,the project leader really needs to stay focused on three things. Communication, metrics, and issues. First and foremost, the leader needs to maintain communication with and between the members of the team.

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Maintaining communication sounds easy, but it can be really hard. When team members start executing, they can get so focused on their own work that they forget about where it fits in with all of the other activities. One way to help inoculate your team against this situation is to share the communication plan with them early in the process. Ensuring that everyone understands how and when information is going to be shared will make is easier to manage the entire project. Second, the project leader needs to track the metrics for the project, to ensure that things are progressing smoothly.

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So you have your project plan, you have your specific task, and usually that involves a combination of technical and creative expertise, or waded from one to the other. So you want to make sure you got that covered, because that’s why you’re really there. On the other hand, you want to be aware of the rest of the team. You want to be aware of what they’re doing because it does impact you. These complicated, long shoots can be a sap of your energy. So it’s important to keep your energy level up, keep your motivation up, especially if the hours are long and it’s stressful.

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Among project management tools and techniques a properly designed project scorecard makes it easy for anyone to see how the project is progressing, and it opens the door for discussions about the challenges of project planning in project management and successes the project team encounters along the way. The third thing for the project leader to focus on during execution is helping their team members identify and resolve issues as they arise. The most obvious reason for this is that the leader may have more information, or more authority, to make a decision than the other people on the team. You want to minimize the bad stuff, the negative stuff, that affects the overall performance and the overall quality of the show.

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But the project leader may also be able to help resolve issues simply by using their relationships and their influence, or by having a different perspective on the issues. One last thing to keep in mind is that execution can be stressful part in step by step project management. And people respond to stress in different ways. This is true for your team members, but it’s also true for the project leader. Great leaders figure out how to keep everyone motivated and engaged, but they can also sense when they need to escalate an issue, or call in extra help.

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Executing a project requires a lot from the project leader. But if you focus on maintaining communication, tracking metrics, and managing issues, then executing a project plan with your team can be a hugely rewarding experience for everyone. Now that’s important, so you want to keep your energy up, but not rise your level of stress. We all can do our individual part, and that spreads around. It can be motivated from somebody at the top of the chain, which is preferred, because that tends to trickle down whatever your mood is, or whatever your energy level is, but even if you’re down in the lower rungs of the crew, you can affect your fellow team members. And that goes for stress too.