Starting a Project Successfully

"A Good Start is half done". An effective project manager should overcome the challenge of optimizing time during this stage as several elements and people come into picture in which lot of time is consumed to decide and makes it difficult to carry the initial momentum. With experienced Project managers this stage can be short and successful.

A project manager sets out and adopt a project life cycle in which he defines range of activities and tasks and the order in which the tasks needs to be undertaken and executed. Most of the advanced projects will be disintegrated into several smaller projects and shall be run in parallel to share the same final goal in order to optimize the time and resources.

Small projects in turn will have their own life cycle and people involved in these project operate in different ways to deliver and in contrast the people in the long term project life cycle operate in a more relaxed manner which give raise to frustration and conflicts among the people and towards the project planning. An effective project manager should deal with these situations more appropriately.

Most of the senior managers believe that the project life cycle can take care of the advanced project complexities and there by project success. But in reality the success of the project depends on the skill of the project manager and interpretation of the project life cycle material. Following project life cycle blindly doesn't ensure success and it is often misleading to consider that completing the tasks in the life cycle will complete the project. Instead it's always important to understand the underlying themes which organization is seeking desperately to pursue, which can be represented in below 4 themes during the project initiation phase.

1. Stake Holders Management
2. Build the Business Case
3. Start the Long lead activities
4. Define early roles and responsibilities

Accurate management of the above 4 themes which are quite time consuming and should be carefully managed in advanced project especially where the scope and scale of work are usually far greater than a standard project. Management  and control of these above 4 steps will help the project through early stages and these 4 steps shall be referred quite often across the project life cycle.