16 Key Project Management Principles Explained
Define Goals First: Begin by determining the project's objectives and setting a clear structure. Choose a project management methodology and define key milestones before the work starts.
Create All The Plans: As part of your project plan, strongly consider creating a risk management plan, quality management plan, change management plan, and communication plan too.
Software Tools Are Crucial: The right project management software tool can help with project planning, assigning resources, and tracking progress. It's a valuable tool that can help your project succeed.
Here are the sixteen project management principles that offer you the best chance of project success. Whether you’re completely new to managing projects or have a few under your belt, these principles drive good project management and help you make sure you haven’t overlooked anything in your project plan or execution.
1. Define the Project Structure
As the project manager, you’ll determine the project’s objectives and put some structure to the project well before project execution begins. This involves choosing a project management methodology and defining the key milestones.
This helps project team members and other stakeholders that are impacted by the project understand what they should expect and when.
2. Confirm the Project Sponsor
One person needs to be responsible for a project, so this principle involves either confirming or finding a sponsor. While you may oversee the project day to day as the project manager, the sponsor is the person responsible for the project.
They hold the budget and control the staff or other resources you will need to achieve the project’s objectives. If your project’s sponsor isn’t clear from the start, work with your manager or project team to find or select a sponsor. Even if it feels like you won’t need one, you may find yourself in a situation where you need additional support further into the project.
3. Set Clear Project Goals & Objectives
It’s your job as the project manager to be clear about the goals and objectives your project needs to achieve. What gets measured gets managed, so be strategic about this principle. If what’s getting measured doesn’t align with stakeholder expectations or the desired outcomes of the project, you won’t be successful.
Think SMART when setting goals and aligning project objectives—that means specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound. While a stretch goal (i.e. a goal that is just beyond what you can reasonably achieve) is okay in some cases, it's better to underpromise and overdeliver.
4. Document all of the Stakeholders
Documenting the stakeholders and their roles in your project is important, especially in an agency setting or in other organizations that work on projects with clients or external partners.
I don’t know a single agency project manager who hasn’t had a random stakeholder show up late in the project and completely derail it. From asking for revisions to approved deliverables to changing the project scope or project timeline completely, I’ve seen it all.
Work with your client or project sponsor to outline all of the stakeholders who are impacted by the project from the very beginning. Even if they swear this person will be a silent observer, you don’t want to be blindsided.
5. Set a Schedule & Project End Date
Project scheduling is more of an art than an exact science, and it can be especially challenging for beginners.
You need to account for the time it takes to complete each task, as well as other factors like other project work or competing priorities, PTO, sick days, tasks taking longer than estimated, and delays in getting approvals, resources, or other needs.
When making the initial schedule, include some buffer and be a little pessimistic. Consider making the project end date on the longer end of your estimated range. But don’t be too pessimistic or you’ll run the risk of your team sitting idle without scheduled work.
6. Create a Project Plan
Once you have your milestones and your project schedule in place, make a detailed plan. This step will look a little different if you are running an agile project. In that case, create a sprint plan with your team that outlines what you hope to accomplish in the next sprint.
For waterfall or hybrid projects, this step is a lot more detailed. Plan out exactly what will be done and when to get you to the end of the project. You may assign tasks to either specific people (if you know your project team) or roles. This might look like outlining tasks for a developer, a content strategist, and a designer.
7. Determine the Project Team & Define Roles
Sometimes, the project timeline will help dictate the project team (based on availability), and other times, the project plan might be built around specific team members' availability.
When determining the project team, think about the project requirements and the skills your team will need to accomplish them. If you know there are any gaps between the skills of the team members you have and what is needed to accomplish the work, don’t panic yet—you have options.
You can ask other team members to act as mentors, or you can ask others in your organization to lend their time and talent to your project. If none of these options are available, consider bringing in a contractor or other temporary team member to fill any skill gaps.
Regardless, it is important to make sure everyone on the team understands their roles. Any ambiguity or confusion can cause problems with delivering the project or seriously strain the team dynamic. The best way to do this is via a RACI chart.
You should also create a plan to keep people accountable. As the project manager, it is up to you to make sure that people do what they said they would (when they said they would)!
8. Determine the Project Budget
Be clear on the project budget before beginning any work, and align the budget to the timeline so you aren’t spending your budget too quickly. If you are working on billable projects, keep a very close eye on labor costs and rein it in early if any team members are burning hours (and budget) too quickly.
Making sure you have enough budget to complete the project is a skill that can take a long time to learn. Project estimates are simply best guesses of how much time and money a project will take.
Set a goal to keep any deviation within ten percent—this is a good way to measure how well you are setting the budget. If you have the option of a contingency budget, ask for one. This is an extra amount of money you can add to the budget in case you need it.
Depending on your charter or contract, there may be additional requirements you need to fulfill before you can use a contingency budget. This might include having the client or another stakeholder sign off, and/or using the entire regular budget first.
9. Determine the Project Scope
As the project manager, one of your most critical responsibilities is understanding the project’s scope and preventing scope creep. If the project’s scope does need to change over the course of the project, that is okay. Complete a change order to make sure the new scope is documented, agreed to, and executed on.
It may be tempting to try to overdeliver and impress your client, project sponsor, or other stakeholders, but this is not a good idea. Your role is to manage expectations and make sure the client or stakeholder is getting what they paid for.
Imagine if you were selling your stakeholder a car. If their budget is modest they should be looking at a Toyota or a Honda, not a Ferrari. Your job is to find them the nicest Toyota or Honda, not give them a Ferrari at their budget. It's the same with digital projects.
You want to make sure your client gets the best they can within the scope and budget. Keep the surprise and delight for how you deliver components or maybe a modest value add at the end.
10. Create a Risk Management Plan
You’ve got your schedule, scope, budget, stakeholders, and project team. It’s all planned out in your project management software, down to the smallest details, and now all you have left to do is execute. What could go wrong? (Don’t answer that...)
This is where your risk management plan comes in. List out all of the things that could potentially derail your project. This might include:
- Running out of budget too soon
- Stakeholders trying to shoehorn in additional scope
- Changing organizational priorities
- New technology emerging, making your project obsolete
- A key team member needs a lot of PTO or leave during the project
- Too many unknowns that change the best course of action for the project over time
Once you have your list of risks, work with the team and stakeholders and plan how you might mitigate them. For example, if you’re concerned about the budget, consider cutting back initial expenses or looking for ways to work more efficiently. If you’re worried about new technology, see what you can learn and evaluate whether to undertake the project now or to wait to see what happens.
There can be pros and cons to each approach, so think about what mitigates the risk the most. Project work will almost never be risk free and that isn’t your goal. You want to eliminate or mitigate as much of the risk as is possible to increase the odds of a successful project.
11. Create a Change Management Plan
Your change management plan is primarily aimed at those impacted by your project. Start by brainstorming everything that will change as a result of your project being completed.
Let’s use a new website as an example. With a new website, those responsible for keeping it up to date will need to learn to make updates in the back end. And if you are making changes to, say, lead forms or where they are sent, the marketing team may also need to learn how to use the new forms and where the data goes when a form is filled out.
And what about the website visitors? Will the privacy policy or terms of use be different? Make sure this is called out in the plan and communicated about frequently. While many users will be excited about the new website, some may be resistant. Make a plan to address resistance and provide additional support where needed.
12. Create a Communication Plan
I believe that there is no more critical project management skill than communication, and your communication plan has a strong impact on your project performance.
In addition to specific communications before, during and after your project to support the change management plan, you want to have a plan for communicating status updates, feedback, and other project details with your team and all stakeholders impacted by your project.
This might include:
- Internal reviews, team check-ins, and 1:1 meetings with project team members
- Status updates (weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly)
- Client or stakeholder reviews and approvals
- Feedback sessions or working meetings
- Project launch communications
- Training plans
- Project retrospectives or post-mortems
Make sure everyone on the team is connected, well informed, and supported. If people feel left out or not fully up to speed, it can have a negative impact. But don’t spend so much time in meetings or overcommunicating that there isn’t enough time for project work.
13. Create a Quality Management Plan
As the project manager, you are responsible for ensuring quality on your projects. So, as you did for risk management and change management, you’ll come up with a quality management plan to make sure the team is delivering high-quality work.
What do the testing and quality assurance phases of the project look like? What is the baseline for acceptance and where can you push to exceed that target?
14. Focus on Delivering Value
If you asked 10 (or 100) different stakeholders how their project manager delivers value, you’d get 10 (or 100) different answers. It's not only about project deliverables and plans. It's about keeping the project moving and the team working together well AND delivering results.
No matter how much time you spend looking at textbooks like the PMBOK, they can’t tell you exactly how to do this because it will be different for every project and project team you work on.
15. Monitor Progress & Performance
Project plans are almost never something you can set and forget. Feedback rounds stretch out. Deliverables need to be adjusted. The team is starting to fatigue from too much context switching.
This is part of your role as the project manager—to keep a close eye on the project progress and the team's performance. One unique aspect of this is that in many organizations, the project team members don’t report to the project manager. So when performance concerns do arise, you’ll need to work with other leaders in the organization to help address them.
16. Close the Project & Document Lessons Learned
All good things must come to an end, and so too must your projects. When all of the deliverables have been handed off and approved, it’s time to start your project closure checklist and document lessons learned in a template.
Your project closure checklist should include things like making sure final invoices have been sent, revoking access to any shared drives or programs, and archiving projects in your project management tools. You may also want to send a customer satisfaction survey.
To document lessons learned, hold a project retrospective or post-mortem. If you can’t get the team together, send out a survey so everyone’s voice can be heard. The information you get here can help your next projects go more smoothly, and process gaps can be addressed.
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