Most businesses must reassess whether their project methodologies can successfully and efficiently achieve new business goals and lower risks. Recent external forces like COVID-19 and industry disruptions brought digital evolution that has changed company goals and priorities. An effective project manager must have more than technical know-how to keep projects and teams on track. A combination of technical and soft skills goes a long way in fostering exemplary leadership qualities. This article at The Ascent by Nicholas Morpus shares eight project management best practices.

The Take Away from Each Project

Every task should be an opportunity to get better as a manager. Everything is a learning process, but the most one can hope for is gathering a few pearls of wisdom from each undertaking. Creating and implementing project management best practices should be one of your top priorities if you are a project manager.

Eight Project Management Best Practices

• A project plan is essentially futile if it is not communicated with the team every time changes occur. For all parties to be on the same page, you must establish and maintain consistent lines of communication. Project managers must hold regular meetings, use project collaboration software, and foster a safe environment to discuss issues.
• You will need to be mindful while allocating work to team members. Assigning too much work to a single team member can lead to burnout and further delay work. You must focus on keeping your team motivated consistently. Invest in workload management tools and set task limits to distribute work equally.
• Team members can feel demotivated if they frequently pick up others’ slack due to unclear guidelines. This will result in conflicts, issues, and missed steps. Thus, defining roles and responsibilities is important. It improves performance and productivity and ensures all tasks are executed on time. Additionally, you can create a RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Contacted, Informed) matrix and ensure to get feedback from team members.

The author also speaks about five more project best practices, like managing risk, scope, project deliverables, retrospective meetings, and projection conclusion meetings.

To read the original article, click on https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/small-business/project-management/articles/project-management-best-practices/