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In an ever-changing technology landscape, every business will find itself managing major technology projects. So how does your business respond? Can you keep your project on budget, on task and on time? Can you keep your customers and staff happy while rolling out new applications and services?
Today’s complex technology requirements can cause projects to balloon in size and complexity without proper long-term planning. In our experience, great project management means much more than keeping initiatives on time, on budget, and on target; it unites clients and teams, creates a vision for a successful project, and gets everyone on the same page to stay on track for success.
SETTING THE STAGE
Every successful technology project begins with a successful onboarding process, whether you are updating hardware, adding additional security features, or launching big deployments or even a whole new infrastructure.
Any project that will involve multiple people with disparate roles and responsibilities will benefit from a Project Manager (PM). Project scheduling and a project coordinator are essential to keeping a project on budget and on time. Having someone to lead that charge is a key to success, they serve as a central point of contact.
At Elevity, we rely on PMs with collaborative online tools to build and track your project timeline. Management and organizational tools are an extremely effective way to keep priorities in one place and team members on the same page. This can include creating to-do lists, assigning and tracking the progress of activities, setting due dates and sharing critical information.
THE PLAN
When planning for long term projects, there are often many factors that no one can foresee from the beginning of the project. This creates a need to plan and create a comprehensive timeline. Pinpoint the final deadline and start building the necessary steps that need to be made to complete a project, starting from the last and moving backwards to the first.
Keep in mind that it is very important to make reasonable time estimations, update timeframes regularly as the project evolves and keep all stakeholders informed. This timeline should include regular meetings and touchpoints for clients so they’re never in the dark about the progress of a project.
The real reason strategic planning is important is that without it, projects designed to improve your business can become a liability. For example, we have seen organizations that launched a migration, only to find that their overtaxed IT department could not manage all of the pieces involved. This can double the investment required to implement the project properly.
In addition, reacting to challenges and not building a proactive timeline will cost your company more in the long run. It can force you to accept emergency charges, pay for expedited shipping or pay to do things multiple times. Even more troublesome is when a security solution is improperly installed, opening an organization to a serious hack.
Rolling out complex technology projects without a strategic and thoughtful approach can result in financial overages, reduced productivity and cybersecurity risk for a business. With the support of an Elevity project manager, businesses can more effectively manage the many moving parts to deploying new systems. If you’d like to learn more about project planning and project management talk to the experts at Elevity.
