Goal directed project management tools

Completing your project may be the number one priority, but a close second is your development as a de-facto project manager. Chances are, you care about your career and your professional development. A professional goal is a statement that defines the goals you will seek out in your career or in your current position. Similarly, a workplace goal is a professional goal, as defined by your current workplace and role. For example, as a professional, your goal could be to improve your communication with teams.

No two goals are alike. When it comes to professional goals, you want them to be more than just a statement. You want them to be your strategy. Depending on your unique situation, your goals can be short-term and long-term. They show that you want to maximize your efficiency in the shoes you currently fill. This goal is particularly important if your team has been struggling to complete projects in a team. For example, you could realize that your main obstacle is the way you set the scope during the project negotiation phase.

Then, you can incorporate that into your goal statement by explaining that you will improve scope-setting methods in the project initiation phase. There is always room for improvement in team communication and collaboration, which makes this professional goal a great one to strive for. You should understand the underlying causes and your own motivation for improvement. This goal might just boil down to getting better project team collaboration software. If your top management decided that you should be a team lead for projects handled at your company, they want to see you taking the role seriously.

Goal Directed Project Management GDPM is a management philosophy accompanied by a set of tools and principles for planning, organizing, leading and controlling projects. GDPM's beauty is in its simplicity:. Goal Directed Project Management allows both project non-experts and experts to participate effectively and appropriately. Project definition view: Clearly links the project to the intended organizational goals and the high level organizational standard principles and procedures for managing the project.

Deliverables view: Milestones with relationships reflect the results on a macroscopic level. The milestone plan gives a stable total overview of the whole project with deadlines on one page!

Mobilization of resources is expensive and often difficult to alter, so detailed planning is necessary to reduce wasted time and effort.

In certain types of projects, planning can be carried out ad nauseam and yet perhaps, not even enough. Computerization projects, for example, do not often have clearly stated end products, since the products are intended to serve people who have their own learning curves in their jobs, and the project is thus aimed at a moving target.

However, this does not cancel the need for project planning, and such planning is necessary to ensure projects are successfully implemented. However, project planning includes prerequisite and subsequent aspects which are more necessary to ensure project success. Such considerations include:. These considerations are not exhaustive, however, and many others can be brought into project planning.

Project planning can be seen as the central core of project management with links to project control and people management human factors as seen in Figure 2. Planning starts off with senior management who may initiate the need for a project and decide if it is feasible; a viability study has to be executed, and this is usually allocated to someone who is interested in the project. The important steps of project planning are shown in Figure 3 in a flow diagram form.

Alongside each task oblong box is shown a document. The rationale for this is discussed in the conclusion. The rest of the text on project planning should be read together with this figure.

Once a project manager has been appointed and job descriptions and requirements for reporting back have been spelled out, the manager should identify what has to be achieved by the project and what possible alternative modus operandi exist for carrying it out.

Once broad-term planning has been carried out, a choice of which direction to follow can be made, and a broad-term plan can be developed for managing the change that the project will bring about.

Obviously there is a complex, influencing relationship among these various activities. For this reason they would be planned in an iterative manner, i.

Once the detailed activities have been scheduled, the management control and reporting structure must be designed. For example: What reports should be used and issued to each person and manager in the project, and at what points should these reports be used and the project reviewed?

Project contingencies could now be planned considering major project constraints. All activities can now be combined into an integrated plan for the project. This plan ultimately has to be communicated to the various involved people.

Two levels of control are distinguished, namely management control and operational control. Operational control is feedback control and consists of changing input and process to achieve correction in output. Management control activities tend to become replanning of what has to be done, once an unacceptable exception or change has been forecast. Both levels will be considered as an integrated entity of control in the remainder of this article.

Control, by its nature, also includes a reporting mechanism, an information mechanism, and a people-management mechanism. If there is a discrepancy between what is being produced by the project and what the target initially was, and this variation is of a level to warrant direct action, then this will trigger some form of decisionmaking action.

The manager has to gather as many relevant facts as possible in the short time available, generate alternatives that could be adopted to overcome the variance situation being experienced, and choose the appropriate alternative which is acceptable within the constraints of resources and objectives.

Very often the decision produced influences the process itself, its outputs or inputs. An adjustment may be made to the sequence of activities planned, or to the intensity of resource allocation to a segment of the activities. If output is within planned tolerances and acceptable to management's objectives, then no immediate action is necessary.

Other control action is appled to managerial plans such as the consideration of contingencies, methods of improving efficiencies, new requirements for the project, and ways to increase the quality of products and people on the project. A complete replanning of a portion of the project may have to be undertaken and some of the previous project planning activities would be executed again.