Are you struggling to keep a project on schedule? An article for PMstudent wants to help you:
1. Defining & Prioritizing Scope
It helps to make a distinction between that which is important, and that which is urgent. Urgency wins over importance; however, those tasks that combine the two should take top priority. In other words, think in terms of must-haves and nice-to-haves.
2. Knowing Constraints
Basically, when you are under deadline and behind schedule, everything that is not time sensitive should be wiped into a corner until further notice. This step should be easier if you have already defined the scope of your priorities (Step 1).
3. Creating Better Estimates
Estimating how long a particular task will take comes down to cold hard experience. To qualify this statement, it is possible to become faster and better at a particular task, but only within the confines of reality. Logically, if one doesn’t improve their approach, it follows that quality or efficiency will not improve either.
4. Understanding the Critical Path
Like the ordering of the five techniques listed in this article, one must pin down the proper sequence of tasks – or risk becoming another headless chicken analogy. Mental stress leads to disorderly actions. Take a deep breath. Order your tasks.
5. Revisiting the Plan
If you’ve defined and prioritized, altered your scope, made your estimates, and sequenced your tasks, if you’ve done everything humanly possible to make the project work and are still coming up short, you may want to backtrack through Steps 1 to 4. Barring that, it might be time to push back your deadline.
The full article can be read at: http://pmstudent.com/5-project-management-techniques-for-procrastinators/
