Do you want your project to be successful?
Many successful projects share one thing in common: they begin with clear, well-defined preparations. If you have these elements in place before the project kicks off, managing it becomes much easier.
Prep #1: Understand the Background Story
You start with a story that brings you to this project. A good story is the one that tells us why we really need to work on this project. The story should answer these questions:
Prep #2: Acknowledge the Pain
You list high level pain, followed by the specific pain points. Example:
The example above tells us the pain that HR member suffers when doing one of their tasks. We will know if our project is successful if these pains are removed.
Prep #3: Explain the Context
Describe what this project is related to and who will be affected. This is important since there’s probably other people dependent on this particular project to get their work done. Make sure they are aware of this project and updated regularly with the progress.
Prep #4: Define the Out of Scope
Describe what’s not in the scope of this project to avoid “feature creep”. We don’t want to keep adding task the scope of the project before it actually achieve the initial goal. Instead, we can put the ideas for next improvement in a list that can be followed up after the project is done.
Prep #5: Result criteria
Define how we will measure the success of the project. Use the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) method to track this.
- OKRs is our effort of making sure everyone knows what’s expected of them at work. OKRs are supposed to be public so that everyone moves towards the same goals and are aware of what others are working on.
- OKRs consist of a list of 3-5 high level Objectives. Under each Objective there should be 3-5 measurable Key Results. Each Key Result can be measured on a score of 0-100%.
- Find out more through this resource.
Prep #6: Define Project stakeholder
List down all the parties that involved in this project. This includes:
The person who will benefit the most from this project, for example, someone from BD will benefit from Facebook marketing project
Representative of a user that will implement result of this project, for example, someone from Marketing that will continue doing Facebook marketing
You. Or the person that leads a project.
Everyone that’s working on this collaboration.
Prep #7: Inspection & Adoption
After the project is finished, you need to deliver the result to the client. However, this is not the end. You need to make sure that the client and user are actually implement it.
Give a time for observing the implementation of your project after you hand over to the client. Make sure that the result meets your result criteria that you define in the beginning.
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Ready to ensure your next project is a success from the start?
Explore our detailed source of guide from Amazon on essential project preparations and start building a strong foundation today.