SOME WAYS TO AVOID MISTAKES DURING PROJECT MANAGEMENT

SOME WAYS TO AVOID MISTAKES DURING PROJECT MANAGEMENT

You may have heard the saying ”Be proactive, not reactive.”  This is very appropriate when considering how best to deal with mistakes.  The idea being to prevent mistakes before they occur. But how exactly do you do that?  Here are a few ways in which to prevent mistakes during project development.

1. Learn from other’s mistakes. Find experienced peers who are willing to share their experiences, and mistakes, and learn from them.

2. Do your research first.  No matter how much you know, you will encounter new challenges on almost a daily basis. Each challenge usually requires you to learn something new. Before you tackle a problem or task, do your homework!  The trial and error way of learning is way to costly and time consuming. Today, with the resources of the Internet, there is little excuse for not doing proper research in advance.

3. Have a plan.   You can not know how to get to your destination without a road map.  A project plan is the road map for a development project – you need to know how you are going to get where you are going.  Days or weeks can be lost if you go down the wrong path. When done the right way, a project plan will keep one fron straying off course.

4. Follow standards and use templates.  There is a good reason why experienced professionals took the time to create and publish industry and company standards. Standards detail best practices and procedures learned over the years from trial and error. Templates such as professional forms can be useful since most of the work has already been done in a standard format.

5. Communicate and coordinate with others. If you are part of a team it is essential to communicate with other team members in order to avoid redundancies and to coordinate your work with the others. There are any number of methods to facilitate team communication, none of which are perfect and all of which are time consuming. However, communication is a critical part of the development process.

These are but a few ways in which to be proactive with the development of your project. These tips, if applied properly, will definitely help to prevent mistakes that could otherwise occur during your project development.

Good luck with your project!