At present management consulting firms maintain relation with several organizations. For training, change management, operational and strategically development and technology implementation management consulting is indispensable. It is common that for effective project management the managers are more and more emphasizing on management consulting. The highly skilled management consultants use the proprietary methodologies clubbed with their own experience to initiate the problem identification process better. Beside execution of management consulting, nowadays for enhanced project management it is also in use at non-business related areas.

Project management is prerequisite of attaining goals effectively and this is mandatory to reach the specific objectives. For accurate project management is wise to note that with a finite resource it is necessary to reach the target and that too as per the required deadline. At present there are several project management software available and leading management consulting firs use them to keep track of particular projects. Several case studies are also consulted by the management consultants as these cases provide better insight regarding adaptation of the solution providing approach.

Management consulting is a human activity; still it cannot be considered to be a cakewalk. There remain intricate and complex business cases that need to be solved. Each case is a project and a proper project management with adherence to milestones, maintenance of work breakdown structure, resource management and allocation are required. To have a better idea about the project management software it is best to get trained.

The management consultants first make the project goal and then the project and its goals are analyzed and the implementation of the solution is decided. In a management consulting firm there may remain an implementation group, a special systems development group and a functional group who monitors the effectiveness and friendliness of the propped solution developed by the management consulting company.

It is prudent to seek solution from a certified management consulting group; still it is worth mentioning that there are several non certified agencies that have proved their abilities with outstanding management consulting. With the overall growth in economies across the globe, popularity and demand of management consulting is going uphill. As information technology consulting along with strategic business solutions, for every business management consulting is necessary. Even the governments in nations like the UK are using better project management techniques with the consultation of the management consulting firms.

Corporations have built internal management consulting divisions to yield better profits. With in-house management consulting professionals it has become easier to get solutions for various projects. For process improvement with the use of the solutions of after consulting with the experts, perfect project management is expected. So, role of the project managers remain immense as they monitor overall development and advancement of the projects. Various websites explain the pros and cons related to management consulting and self research can help to know the concept better. Again searching a management consulting firms is pretty easy, by using a popular search engine, web portals of different firms can be reached. There are many associations for the management consulting practitioners and firms. These associations have significantly bolstered professional scopes and purposes.

Proper management always can enhance business performance and in this era of electronic commerce as technology infrastructure has undergone considerable changes, project management is most important. To survive better in the competitive global business scene it is mandatory to have a proper project management to ensure effective man management. This is the time of global recession and to prevail better, it is necessary to go for right HR Consulting as well.

There are different companies that have come up with partnership development programs and these companies need HR consulting while initiating new business merge ups. While dealing with the new ventured, it is indeed essential to manage a project effectively. Actually this facilitates better time management and necessary work breakdown structure.

It is wise for all stake holders to remain well aware of the position and condition of the projects where they are involved. A project manager, while setting the goals and preparing the milestone, can explain all the details. Project Management is indispensable in modern world and it is common that it has been an integral part of all successful business growth.

With the expansion of globalization, things have gone beyond the barriers and managing technology, budgeting and determining time management is a matter of few clicks of mouse. In the way of achieving business goals, the managers want to determine the roles and responsibilities of each resource accurately. To get the best out of the technology infrastructure as well it is prudent to have an overview of where exactly a project is heading and what exactly is the role of each resource.

Implementation of system with the exploitation of the benefits if information technology, things have considerably improved. Now almost all of the businesses are aiming for better management of supply chain along with the regular transaction. For the cause different business solutions provider have come up with enterprise resource plan software and these typically enterprise centric software can be customized as per different business requirements. Management and implementation of the softwares definitely involve hardcore project management skills.

Every project involves risks and the project managers are well aware of handling, managing and minimizing the risks. Foremost the mangers analyze the potential risk and then make several contingency plans. For each potential risk, a cost effective solution and alternative is determined. Then the project is launched. Each work or task is broken and distributed between the various stakeholders. A long drawn or a big project involves milestones. The project moves forward as each milestone is achieved.

Implementation of ERP and creating a technology infrastructure is not at all a cakewalk, it can take in months. There are different consultant firms who provide quotes after vivid analysis and business mapping. It is best to punch in the toll free numbers of these consultancy firms before approaching an IT vendor. There can be alternative usage of technologies, so selection of a specific technology is not a layman’s work. The consultants can provide better insight and a consultancy fee. Taking help and assistance of consultancies can also safeguard from unwanted excess flow of cash in IT implementation.

Introduction 

The title of project manager (PM) is used to mean different things in different companies.  Fortunately there is a standards body called the Project Management Institute which provides excellent guidance around the role and function of a project manager.  

Some will disagree, but I don’t care if your project manager is PMI certified or not.  You need to care about having a project manager with the skill to carry out the role as the Institute defines it.  It’s your change management strategy, and it’s your reputation on the line. 

Finding a Project Manager 

Do you need a certified Project Management Professional (PMP)?  As I said above, I don’t care.  There are newly certified PMP’s who have taken their tests and gotten the certification, but they may not be battle tested.  There are veteran project managers who never got the fancy title, but they know how to manage projects.  And there is everything in between.  The track record is what you need to care about. 

Do you have a strong PM on your team now?  Is that person well respected, perhaps a key opinion leader in your organization?  Do they treat project management as a profession?  Then by all means use them.   

If, on the other hand, project manager has been a title used by junior, untrained people who walk around with a task list and a clip board, it’s time to bring on stronger talent. 

Your fastest route to a proven project manager will be a contract hire, either from a reputable firm or an independent.  There are many good ones out there.  Get and check references, and interview at least three.  Let your key opinion leaders and managers interview them as well.  Look for their track record and for good chemistry. 

Set the Project Manager Up for Success 

Simply put, everyone needs to understand that the project manager is your alter ego.  Everyone includes you. 

Your managers and project leaders must understand that they are accountable to the PM for providing all of their tasks, their dependencies on other tasks and other work units, their schedule commitments, and their resource requirements. 

They need to understand that the PM will review all of their information and look for problems.  These could include missed tasks, schedule inconsistencies, resource overloads, etc.  Often managers will tell the PM that they can handle some of these problems, by working people longer hours or by overlapping some tasks “by a day or two”.  A good project manager is going to challenge such claims, and you’ll need to stand behind the PM. 

The PM is going to hold everyone accountable for milestone deliverables.  In most projects, especially those that are complex, milestones are missed and contingency plans must be activated.  Again, you as the leader need to support the PM as they hold people accountable. 

Handling Conflicts 

It’s entirely possible that the PM will have conflicts with managers, team leads or others in the organization.  Make it safe for people to discuss and bring up such conflicts.  Just because the PM is your alter ego doesn’t make them right — any more than you are always right.  

Engage your key opinion leaders along with the project manager and others.  Find out the facts contributing to the conflict, and make the decisions necessary to get the change management strategy back on track. 

Change management strategies that fail often do so because of poor project management.  Don’t let that happen to you.

Managing your website development need not cause you sleepless nights providing you learn the secrets of successful project management. Perform the best practices in project management and give your project the best chance of success.

Define objectives

Objectives guide everyone on the project to your final goals. Are your objectives to sell your product online, to provide customer support, to promote investor relations? Carefully decide and clearly document your objectives.

Decide the critical success factors ?the things at the end of the project which tell you if you’ve been successful. Make them measurable so you know if you’ve achieved them. For example, the website development should result in an increase in online sales of 25% by year end.

Stakeholder analysis

A stakeholder is someone with an interest in your project’s success (or failure). Decide who they are and whether they support your project. Perform stakeholder analysis by classifying them (high or low) according to how motivated they are in helping (or blocking) your project and how influential (high or low) they are.

Highly influential and supportive people are your allies. Gain their support whenever you can. Aim to reduce the influence of people who are both highly influential and against your project as these people could act to damage your project.

During your stakeholder analysis, draw up strategies for dealing with each group of stakeholders.

Define deliverables

Deliverables are tangible things produced during the project. Talk with key stakeholders to help define deliverables. Will your website design include web page layouts and sitemap for use by the programming team? What is the content for each page? Write all this down.

Key stakeholders must review and agree the deliverables accurately reflect what they expect to be delivered.

Project planning

Define how you will arrive at your objectives. This involves planning how many people, resources and budget are required. If delivering this in house, decide what activities are required to produce each deliverable.

For example, you might decide a web designer will develop page layouts and navigation diagrams. You might decide the marketing team will supply all product details and photographs. You might decide the finance manager will set up merchant and payment gateway accounts to enable e-commerce transactions via your website. If outsourcing work, specify exactly what the sub-contractor should deliver.

Estimate the time and effort required for each activity and decide realistic schedules and budget. Ensure key stakeholders review and agree the plan and budget.

Communication planning

Hold a kick off meeting with the team and explain the plan. Ensure everyone knows exactly what the schedule is, and what is expected of them.

For example, the web designer needs to know that he is to produce page layouts and navigation diagrams based upon the marketing manager’s requirements. He needs to know his expected start and end times.

Share your project communication plan with the team. This should include details of report templates, frequency of reporting and meetings, and details of how conflicts between teams and their members will be resolved.

Project tracking

Constant monitoring of variations between actual and planned cost, schedule and scope is required. Report variations to key stakeholders and take corrective actions if variations occur. To get a project back on track you will need to juggle cost, scope and schedule.

Suppose your programmer hits technical problems which threaten to delay the project. You might recover time by re-organising or shortening remaining tasks. If that’s not possible, you might consider increasing the budget to employ an additional programmer, or consider reducing the scope in other areas.

Be aware that any adjustments you make to the plan might affect the quality of deliverables. If you need to increase the budget, seek approval from the project sponsor.

Change management

Once started, all projects change. Decide a simple change strategy with key stakeholders. This could be a committee which decides to accept or reject changes which comprises of you and one or more key stakeholders.

Assess the impact of each change on scope, cost and schedule. Decide to accept or reject the change. Be aware that the more changes you accept the less chance you have of completing the project on time and within budget unless you reduce scope in other areas.

Suppose the marketing manager wants to add a popup window to display full size photographs of products. Assess the impact of this change. You might need to remove some remaining tasks to include this change and stay within budget. Or, it might be impossible to include the change without increasing the budget or schedule.

Don’t blindly accept changes without assessing the impact or your project will overrun.

Risk management

Risks are events which can adversely affect the success of the project. Identify risks to a project early. Decide if each risk is likely or unlikely to occur. Decide if its impact on the project is high or low.

Risks that are likely to occur and have high impact are the severest risks. High impact but unlikely risks, or low impact but likely risks pose a medium threat. Unlikely and low impact risks pose the least threat.

Create a mitigation plan of the actions necessary to reduce the impact if the risk occurs. Start with the severest risks first, then deal with the medium risks. Regularly review risks. Add new ones if they occur.

Suppose the marketing manager cannot decide what he wants from the website. Without knowing what the marketing manager wants, the team cannot deliver a website to meet his expectations. You assess this risk as highly likely to occur and having high impact. Your mitigation plan might be that the web designer develops page layouts to be reviewed by the manager early in the project.

Summary

Performing best practices in project management will give your website development project the best chance of success.

Managing a project can be daunting. Whether planning your wedding, developing a new website or building your dream house by the sea, you need to employ project management techniques to help you succeed. I’ll summarise the top 7 best practices at the heart of good project management which can help you to achieve project success.

Define the scope and objectives

Firstly, understand the project objectives. Suppose your boss asks you to organise a blood donor campaign, is the objective to get as much blood donated as possible? Or, is it to raise the local company profile? Deciding the real objectives will help you plan the project.

Scope defines the boundary of the project. Is the organisation of transport to take staff to the blood bank within scope? Or, should staff make their own way there? Deciding what’s in or out of scope will determine the amount of work which needs performing.

Understand who the stakeholders are, what they expect to be delivered and enlist their support. Once you’ve defined the scope and objectives, get the stakeholders to review and agree to them.

Define the deliverables

You must define what will be delivered by the project. If your project is an advertising campaign for a new chocolate bar, then one deliverable might be the artwork for an advertisement. So, decide what tangible things will be delivered and document them in enough detail to enable someone else to produce them correctly and effectively.

Key stakeholders must review the definition of deliverables and must agree they accurately reflect what must be delivered.

Project planning

Planning requires that the project manager decides which people, resources and budget are required to complete the project.

You must define what activities are required to produce the deliverables using techniques such as Work Breakdown Structures. You must estimate the time and effort required for each activity, dependencies between activities and decide a realistic schedule to complete them. Involve the project team in estimating how long activities will take. Set milestones which indicate critical dates during the project. Write this into the project plan. Get the key stakeholders to review and agree to the plan.

Communication

Project plans are useless unless they’ve been communicated effectively to the project team. Every team member needs to know their responsibilities. I once worked on a project where the project manager sat in his office surrounded by huge paper schedules. The problem was, nobody on his team knew what the tasks and milestones were because he hadn’t shared the plan with them. The project hit all kinds of problems with people doing activities which they deemed important rather than doing the activities assigned by the project manager.

Tracking and reporting project progress

Once your project is underway you must monitor and compare the actual progress with the planned progress. You will need progress reports from project team members. You should record variations between the actual and planned cost, schedule and scope. You should report variations to your manager and key stakeholders and take corrective actions if variations get too large.

You can adjust the plan in many ways to get the project back on track but you will always end up juggling cost, scope and schedule. If the project manager changes one of these, then one or both of the other elements will inevitably need changing. It is juggling these three elements – known as the project triangle – that typically causes a project manager the most headaches!

Change management

Stakeholders often change their mind about what must be delivered. Sometimes the business environment changes after the project starts, so assumptions made at the beginning of the project may no longer be valid. This often means the scope or deliverables of the project need changing. If a project manager accepted all changes into the project, the project would inevitably go over budget, be late and might never be completed.

By managing changes, the project manager can make decisions about whether or not to incorporate the changes immediately or in the future, or to reject them. This increases the chances of project success because the project manager controls how the changes are incorporated, can allocate resources accordingly and can plan when and how the changes are made. Not managing changes effectively is often a reason why projects fail.

Risk management

Risks are events which can adversely affect the successful outcome of the project. I’ve worked on projects where risks have included: staff lacking the technical skills to perform the work, hardware not being delivered on time, the control room at risk of flooding and many others. Risks will vary for each project but the main risks to a project must be identified as soon as possible. Plans must be made to avoid the risk, or, if the risk cannot be avoided, to mitigate the risk to lessen its impact if it occurs. This is known as risk management.

You don’t manage all risks because there could be too many and not all risks have the same impact. So, identify all risks, estimate the likelihood of each risk occurring (1 = not likely, 2 = maybe likely, 3 = very likely). Estimate its impact on the project (1 – low, 2 – medium, 3 – high), then multiply the two numbers together to give the risk factor. High risk factors indicate the severest risks. Manage the ten with the highest risk factors. Constantly review risks and lookout for new ones since they have a habit of occurring at any moment.

Not managing risks effectively is a common reason why projects fail.

Summary

Following these best practices cannot guarantee a successful project but they will provide a better chance of success. Disregarding these best practices will almost certainly lead to project failure.