A project goal that people can understand

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One key to success is making sure everyone understands what your project is supposed to accomplish. Here are tips for putting together a project goal that keeps your project on track to success.

Identify a specific business objective or issue to resolve. Successful projects solve a significant ongoing issue or produce new capabilities for the business and/or its customers. The project goal should succinctly describe the capability or issue, and the outcomes the project will deliver. For example: “The project will address gaps in tracking shipments to our remote locations by creating an extension to our existing logistics application.”

Verify the goal beyond your sponsor and primary customer. As key stakeholders, the project sponsor and primary customer must support the project goal statement. To ensure an accurate and meaningful project goal, conduct a stakeholder inventory and verify the project goal with other influential leaders. That way, you avoid questions about the project intent or scope that could delay project launch. 

Smaller goals work best. Project goals can be quite extensive, which is not only fine, but also often necessary. However, smaller goals achieved through a series of targeted projects are less risky than trying to run one large project. Agile project methods embrace this concept. Breaking your goal into smaller pieces means achieving outcomes earlier. Also, smaller goals might reduce the need for organizational change management activities. You can still achieve significant objectives by delivering in progressive steps. 

Don’t dilute the goal. Ensure every project task helps you achieve your goal. Especially on longer projects, other goals have a way of sneaking into your project. Ensure that you and your team members focus on only the work needed to complete your project as defined. Enforce a stringent change management process to avoid scope creep, and you’ll be on your way to delivering successful outcomes!

For more about project management, check out my Project Management Foundations course.

What Goes into a Project Charter?

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Photo by Firmbee on Unsplash

A project charter defines and formally launches a project. What information goes into one? What level of detail is best? Here are my tips for what a project charter should do.

  • Authorize the project for a smooth launch. Primarily, a project charter ensures the project is authorized, so money and effort can be expended. A brief announcement email might suffice. Or significant detail could be required, depending on the organization’s norms. Include the information your organization requires for project authorization, so you can launch the project without issues.
  • Inform and engage stakeholders to obtain resources. Resources are often in short supply. Managers want to assign the right people for the job. Include the information that helps managers identify who to assign as team members for your project. This information often includes required technical skills, preliminary project timeframes, funding sources, estimated project milestones, and the project priority within the organization’s work portfolio.
  • Obtain funds. A sponsor’s project approval may not be enough to release project funds. The project charter must contain information required by the finance organization. This can include internal and external resourcing needs, whether existing or new vendor contracts will be used to obtain skilled resources, cash flow projections, and other cost and business case details.
  • Define responsibility/authority. Projects require a shared understanding of the responsibilities of the project manager, sponsor, and other key stakeholders. In some organizations, these roles are pre-defined across all projects. In others, responsibilities can change based on project context, and the management level from which the project is managed. The project charter should include details of assigned authority, accountability and decision-making processes.
  • Assumptions, risks, constraints, and other details. Organizations often have specific information they require in a charter, for example, a regulatory requirement that mandates a project deadline. Be sure to identify the unique industry expectations your organization and management team have regarding a charter.

An effective project charter can vary wildly –from a verbal assurance by a senior leader, to an informal email, or a detailed multi-page document. Follow the guidelines above as a start. If you vary from your organization’s typical charter, include more detail versus less. An effective charter gets your project off to a good start – and that’s the first step to successfully completing your project.

Here’s a great resource for project management templates.

Developing a Productive Project Culture

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A productive cultural environment is critical to delivering successful project outcomes. Here are tips for managing a productive project culture whether your project has a unique culture or is an extension of your organization’s culture.

Plan cultural development tasks. Effective project culture doesn’t happen by accident. The best project managers are purposeful about developing a positive culture: constructive ways to make decisions, defining your authority, and defining your technical team leaders’ responsibilities. Building a common understanding of how you will communicate with each other is a fundamental cultural requirement. This takes more effort than most people realize. Vendor personnel might need to adjust their habits and expectations for your project. Employees from different offices or countries might need to adjust.

Plan for tasks to bring your team together and ensure cultural expectations are aligned. While people are adjusting their cultural expectations, spend time to help them smoothly integrate with your project.

Get feedback. Cultural transitions might be difficult for team members. Even when they may appear to be working well, they may struggle working within your team’s expectations. Ask for and carefully review feedback regarding your project culture. Listen carefully and offer help if you have any doubts about their comfort level.

Focus on positive intent. You may find team members’ cultural expectations differ from your own. Don’t dismiss their expectations as wrong or incongruent. Instead, focus on the positive intent of their cultural norms. Learn what they hope to achieve through their cultural habits. Ask team members whether they see difficulties or risks in the cultural elements you put in place. This helps build deeper understanding and make team harmony easier to achieve.

Be flexible and consistent. Team members work best when they feel understood and appreciated. The best results come from being flexible to accommodate individual needs, while being consistent working with your full team. Say a team member has different expectations about their involvement in decision making. You can speak with them ahead of time one-on-one, while involving the entire team in the decision after that conversation. The individual’s expectations are met, while the team sees a consistent approach to making decisions.

Review your results. Once you bring together your project culture, don’t lose focus on it. Your culture will be challenged by the stresses of project highs and lows. Work with your team and adjust to meet the perceived needs of your team members. Spend extra time collecting opinions or provide more assurance to hard working team members – it can help you maintain your team’s effectiveness.

For more about corporate culture, check out Sara Canaday’s Organizational Culture course.

Renewing your passion as a project manager

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Photo by bantersnaps on Unsplash

It’s easy to succumb to the pressure of a steady parade of project challenges and forget the plusses of being a project manager. To regain your project manager passion, consider the contributions a project manager makes:

Driving your business’s success. Projects don’t succeed without project managers and businesses don’t move forward without successful projects. For every new product, customer success story, or happy-dance stock price move for your business, you know projects are behind those successes. Project managers are the on-the-ground tacticians of a business and drive its ongoing viability.

Nurturing your team members. As a project manager, you make a significant difference in the lives of your team members. I have had to protect my team members from business challenges on every project I’ve managed! Poorly thought out changes, management probes, oversold benefits, and priority squabbles are a few examples where you have to step in to protect your team. That way, your team can complete their tasks and advance the project. Plus, you can develop your team members by mentoring them and assigning skill-building tasks.

Satisfying and supporting consumers. Your role in bringing projects to life can affect consumers in significant ways. Project end-products fulfill not only your business’s needs, but also your customers’ needs. Keep in mind that your projects provide new ways of producing work, servicing products, and supporting the community. Your efforts as a project manager move the economy forward!

Growing yourself. Your project management role can be a vehicle for personal growth. I’ve learned something from every project I’ve worked on, like the inner workings of an industry to new technology to best practices for leading people. By definition, a project creates a unique product or result, so learning comes with the territory. Use your projects to take advantage of exposure to new business areas, new technologies and new or enhanced skills. Step outside your comfort zone to learn even more. 

Promoting fun. Curt W. Coffman and Kathie Sorensen, PhD authored the book Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast. When you create a positive project culture where fun is promoted, you will realize better results. And that reinforces your purpose as a project manager to: create new outcomes, support the business, and provide opportunities for people. 

To learn more, search for “project management” (or any topic that interests you) in the LinkedIn Learning library.