Top 10 Project Management Principles You Must Know

Project management requires skills, tools, and knowledge to complete a project and achieve its goals. It is a complex field and there are a few things that a project manager must know to become successful such as methodologies, reports, and tools that exist. The top 10 Project Management Principles mentioned below might help you and any project manager should know. These principles are fundamental rules to follow for successful project management.

The Project Management Principles are:

1. Project Management Structure
2. Point of Contact
3. Clear Project Goals and Objectives
4. Communication Plan
5. Roles and Responsibilities
6. Risk Recognition
7. Project Performance Baseline
8. Strong Change Management Plan
9. Value Delivery 
10. Transparency

1. Project Management Structure:

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Formalized structure plays a vital role in a project. This is one of the foremost among all the Project Management Principles. The structure includes Processes, Procedures, and Tools and it is a framework that includes planning, executing, and tracking. Projects should have a Project Charter, Project Plan, and Project team with the required skills.

2. Point of Contact:

An effective point of contact is important for a successful project. Your point of contact acts as a Spokesperson to other members in an organization. We should have a set point of contact which makes it easier to communicate, escalate, and guide stakeholders in making big decisions regarding the project. 

3. Clear Project Goals and Objectives:

Before the Planning phase, you should know about the main goals and objectives of the project. Goals refer to the expected benefits of the project while Objectives refer to the steps you take to achieve them. These two play a major role in project management principles.

SMART goal paradigm (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Time-bound) guides you in setting goals and objectives for a better outcome. All key stakeholders, Points of contact, and customers should approve and review the objectives. Behind the failed project one of the most common factors is the lack of setting clear goals and objectives. Scope, Schedule, and Budget can plan according to this principle.

4. Communication Plan:

Efficient communication is important for an organization. A solid communication plan is essential to become successful within a company. There must be a communication plan to regulate communication between yourself and project sponsors while reporting to implement the project decisions properly. In the project management principles communication is 90% required for the job.

For a project to be successful you must communicate project activities, project risks, and project issues to the team members and stakeholders. Communicated information includes project scope, status, statements, updates, baseline information, acceptance, and performance measures. A communication plan is a larger part of the project management plan, it should cover who, what, when, where, why, and how. The project manager is the best person to communicate with the upper management for internal communication.

5. Roles and Responsibilities:

A project should have well-defined roles, policies, and procedures, which means everyone should know what they are responsible for and whom they answer also you must know how you are managing the scope of work, quality of the project, schedule, etc. These roles and responsibilities play an important role in project management principles.

The duties one should be assigned are responsibility, accountability, consultant,

involvement, and sign-off authority. These are the roles for responsibility and setting proper accountability. The performance management baseline is the standard that needs to be accountable. An added advantage of accountability is that you can identify the top performers and reward them as well as identify underperformers and help them to improve.

6. Risk Recognition:

Risk is part of any project as you already know risk is a part of life and this is normal. Before starting the project you should figure out potential risks. To check where the risk lies you can use historical data and knowledge from the team and sponsors. The Risk Register Template also helps to capture all this information.

It is very important to minimize the risks or eliminate their impact on your project. To do so you should identify the risk areas, evaluate the impacts, and monitor them. You should have a plan to resolve it before it becomes a problem. You are not going to foresee every risk but hopefully, you should be able to identify the big ones, that’s why you should concentrate on irregularities and train your team. This is the key principle among all project management principles because the sooner you identify the risk, the faster you can mitigate it and keep the project on track.

7. Project Performance Baseline:

Among project management principles, a performance baseline needs to measure success. A project usually has three basic components:

• Costs
• Scheduling and
• Scope

These components have a baseline where performance is measured. Baselines integrate to become performance management baseline. If any one component is changed it gets reflected on the others. You should always measure the various aspects of your project and determine if the figured reports are in line with the planned ones.

8. Strong Change Management Plan:

Delays, issues, and risks might make changes to your project scope, budget, or schedule. By tracking the changes and establishing an approval process called Change management. To meet the customer expectations a well-defined scope is needed to ensure the outcomes of the project. A project may suffer from scope creep without strong change management.

As a project manager, you need to know that the project plans likely change when your team starts the project execution phase. The change management process is simple, you need to create a change management plan, a document where you specify how to handle the changes. This will guarantee that whenever a stakeholder or a member of the team makes changes in a plan there will be a change management process. Should create, fill and approve the change requests in most of the projects. This is one of the project management principles that plays a crucial role.

9. Value Delivery:

It is very important to focus on your clients and stakeholders’ expectations and meet their project requirements in any project. The project goals and objectives must be realistic and agreed upon by the project team and stakeholders, which a project manager must know. Once after reaching an agreement with clients and stakeholders you can think about your value chain, supply chain, deliverables, milestones, and quality standards and evaluate whether delivering the expected value.

Value delivery capabilities are project management tools, procedures, and processes that you use to deliver value to the customers. This also includes your planning sessions and detailed scope of work.

10. Transparency: 

Transparency is reporting the progress of the project to all the stakeholders and parties involved and no aspect should hide from them. Key stakeholders should be informed only on key points, setting milestones is ideal for progress regarding budget, schedule, and key tasks. Reports, updates, and project tracking are important to inform the team of the project.

These are a few project management principles there are many more principles, but these give you the way to success.

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Conclusion:

After going through this information, I am sure that this information might be useful to know about project management. Project management principles play a vital role in Project management. The Project Management Certification course is the ultimate access to get into this field. These principles might give you an idea about project management but there are many more principles involved in project management. According to me, these are the top 10 project management principles.

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