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How to Manage Large Projects
By admin | December 11, 2009
The most difficult thing about managing a large project is juggling the set of deliverables, timeframes, staff, suppliers, equipment, materials, contractors and customers. It can be an extremely challenging task. To make things easier for you, we’ve described here:So what is a large project?
It’s usually one that:
■ Involves a large financial expenditure
■ Takes anywhere from 6 months to 2 years
■ Has a big project team in different locations
■ Involves the creation of large quantities of deliverables
■ Requires external suppliers and contractors. Large projects typically have higher risk and harder to control than small projects, as they involve large quantities of people, time, money andresources.
So they have a lot more to lose when things go wrong! Using MPMM and Method123 you have 10 different processes available for monitoring and controlling large projects. Each of these processes are described below:
1. Manage Time Delivering “on schedule” is usually the hardest challenge for a large project, due to the sheer amount of work involved. You need a clear time management process to record time spent by staff, log it in a timesheet register and update the project plan with current progress. This process allows you to track progress and control delivery against the original target date set. All staff should complete timesheets and hand them into the project administrator weekly.
2. Minimize Cost To minimize the cost of the project, a cost management process should be implemented. This involves recording all expenses in an expense register and regularly updating the project plan and financial plan schedules with the status of the project budget. Only by gaining an up-to-date view of the total project spend, can you control expenditure and minimize costs.
3. Control Quality The quality management process is used to conduct quality assurance reviews to check that the deliverables produced by the project meet the quality targets set.
A set of quality control measures are put in place, to monitor and control the quality of each deliverable produced.
4. Reduce Change Using a change management process, the Project Manager can identify any requests for change and review their potential effect on the project. Large projects all too frequently suffer from scope creep, whereby changes are implemented without approval. This causes delays and budget over-runs. The change process will prevent this occurring, by monitoring and controlling all changes and implementing a formal process for their approval.
5. Mitigate Risks Large projects usually encounter a larger amount of risk, so the key to success is in identifying these risks early and mitigating them before they impact on the project. Using a risk management process, you can identify and mitigate project risks early. Low and medium priority risks will be addressed by the Project Manager, however high priority risks will be raised at Project Board meetings to be addressed.
Jason has managed large projects of up to 2 billion dollars. He now runs a website that sells project management templates called method123.
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