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11 Tips to make managing your project easier

I have been formally planning a big personal project recently - my PhD. I was lucky enough to be given a great entry level book on project planning by my husband, The Principles of Project Management. I should mention, he manages Sitepoint.com, who publish the book.

I really enjoy reading the book. It is targeted at those managing business projects, with a budget and other staff involved. It certainly isn’t directed at those managing personal projects. In fact, the author Meri Williams suggests you should just manage personal projects informally in Excel. That wasn’t really the advice I was looking for.

Why I loved this book

This book gave me a different perspective on planning projects. I can take the business best practices described, and apply them to my situation

Before everything else:

• Accountability needs to be built-in - set up a plan for reviewing your project. I have now set up a progress report that I complete each week and save to PDF. It includes current tasks, tasks starting in the next two months, and current issues. I save it for myself, so that I am keeping track each week, and it forces me to examine the timeline regularly.
• Identify stakeholders before you begin - other people probably care about how it progresses. My main stakeholder is my PhD supervisor. Now I send him the PDF each week, so that he is aware of what is going on, whether he finds time to meet with me or not. Sometimes I edit it so he doesn’t know about my “secret” plans, but he gets most of it.

Planning:

• The smallest unit should be no more than 5 days work
• Tasks in a project should be yes or no - people can’t correctly “guess” how complete a task is
• When estimating time, automatically add 40% to estimates to account for human optimism. Meri discusses other methods, but this is the best for personal projects, I think.
• Only include real dependencies - don’t use them as a way to organise your plan
• Plan the next four weeks properly, and have a rough plan (with reasonable time estimations) beyond that.
• Add contingency at the end of a section (rather than within each task) and label it something secret (so the boss doesn’t notice). I think I will call my contingency “optimisation of staining protocol.”
• Rough plans should look rough to remind you not to bank on them. If you make your plan look slick, you need to make sure it is properly planned.

Execution:

• Your project plan is not your to do list. Write a personal to do list, in another form for each section as you come to it.
• Keep a list of issues, with plan for dealing with them, and a due date. I have a list displayed above my desk, and I add it to my weekly report.

If you are thinking of planning personal projects, then it is definitely worth investigating agreed best practices. On a different scale, they can help us to plan our success.

What tips and tricks do you use when planning personal projects?

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