Nowadays, companies depend more than ever on technology, which is why IT projects are becoming more and more necessary. Their proper management is vital to meet those goals set in order to achieve a healthier and more advanced technological ecosystem.
However, many times companies manage projects that end up exceeding the established time and budget, with unsatisfactory overall results. This is due to a series of mistakes that, believe it or not, are easy to avoid. Today, we will talk to you about it and give you the best tips to make your IT projects successful. In addition, we will offer you a great solution for modern IT teams. Read all the way to the end!
5 things you need to improve to manage successful IT projects
Resource planning
First, the scope and objectives must be established. Then, it is important to list the activities and steps needed to meet each proposed objective. In this way, you can more accurately estimate the resources and budget required.
Proper resource planning allows you to stay within budget and keep changes to a minimum.
For this, optimal planning should take the following guidelines into account:
- What is not planned, does not exist.
- Planning should never be done by the project manager alone, it should always be done as a team.
- The defined plan must be communicated to all stakeholders.
- Project goals and objectives are not dynamic over time.
Inflexible methodologies
A modern IT team must have the ability to execute its various projects flexibly. Ideally, it should be able to adopt different methodologies according to the qualities and complexity levels of each one.
Let’s look at the essential methodologies when planning IT projects:
- Waterfall: This is the traditional framework that defined the basic phases of any project. Any platform you use to manage your projects must have access to this methodology.
- Agile: as its name suggests, this method is more dynamic and flexible, for projects that need to modify products or services throughout the project.
- Hybrid: a combination of classic and agile, this methodology is for projects that must have a short development time and because of its objectives and goals must be flexible in introducing continuous changes.
The ability to adopt one or the other depending on your type of project is key to obtaining satisfactory results.
Limited visualization
A limited view of the different tasks included in a project can be a problem for team members.
This is because partial views don’t allow you to get the full picture of how your IT projects are developing. With such a visualization, you can miss important details—making you more prone to errors and delays during management.
Having a modern visualization that can be adapted to the different ways of working of each of those involved in the project is essential to optimize the productivity and effectiveness of the team.
Rigorous project analysis
Every project must have reports and metrics tracking to introduce continuous improvements to the management.
If you don’t measure the performance of your projects in different ways, you will encounter the same obstacles over and over again during the development of future projects.
Applying metrics helps you to know the strengths and weaknesses of your management. So it is essential that the platform on which you manage your project gives you the ability to create quick and accurate reports and choose the metrics you need.
Depending on the type of IT project you are developing, you may pay more or less attention to the following metrics:
- Schedule assessment or timeline: you should answer questions such as, where the project tasks and milestones are met? Analyze the life cycle of your project and determine in which phases most incidents and delays occur.
- Budget tracking: Are your projects staying within budget? If the answer is no, evaluate what you are overlooking when planning.
- Productivity: this metric is useful at the organizational level, but can also be applied in these specific contexts. It allows you to control the good use of resources and avoid both work peaks and slack periods.
Poor collaboration and communication between teams
This is one of the most common mistakes. Communication is a key factor in any organization. Fundamentally, everything depends on it for everything to work correctly.
Many times we do not realize it, but most project management is based on communicating: with the work team, with customers, users, or suppliers. Both in writing and orally. And these are some of the most common mistakes:
- Wrong or incomplete information.
- Lack of clarity in the message.
- Incorrect means of communication.
- Inadequate time management.
In order to improve communication, the following points should be taken into account:
Establish a communication strategy
Plan both internal and external communications. Choose the appropriate level of language to use: remember that IT projects take place in highly specialized environments. Therefore, it is necessary to think about who will receive the message, not who is sending it.
Always seek feedback
Getting feedback is crucial because it will let you know if the message was received and understood. In those responses, you can determine if you need to be more specific to avoid mistakes.
Pre-establish communication channels
Formalize and control the communication channels your team will use: reports, intranets, mail, etc. Establish mail patterns or templates for the transmission of timely and specific information.
Encourage active listening
More valuable than knowing how to talk is knowing how to listen. If you listen actively, it will be easy to detect information gaps, for example. You will also be able to ask questions and make relevant contributions.
If you avoid these mistakes, you will be able to manage more successful IT projects, which is necessary for an organization that is at the cutting edge of technology.
Luckily, we have 1 tool with which you can avoid these mistakes and many others.
The most complete ITSM solution for IT project management
That’s right! There is a digital solution that integrates service desk and project management module. With Freshservice you can enjoy a centralized platform designed for you to manage IT assets and projects:
- Create projects from tickets, changes, or problems.
- Automate your project tasks and other workflows.
- Based on triggers and conditions specific to your service desk to generate new IT projects.
- Have a holistic view of all tasks in one place.
- Generate and customize reports.
- Manage projects with any methodology.
- Develop end-to-end software projects.
These are just some of the benefits you will have using Freshservice. If you want to know in-depth all that this tool can offer you, then do not hesitate to contact us!
