Three Tips for Excellence in Project Execution

I’ve been extremely fortunate to have a colleague of mine Mike Knapp, from Incrementa Consulting, offer his expertise for my Excellence in Execution month. He’s a great problem solver, technology guru and project superhero. His focus is leveraging technology and great processes to grow your business. His experience is different than mine, and will be valuable to all of you. Enjoy!

In car racing, the difference between winning and … everything else can come down to split-seconds. Winning a race requires that the entire team, from the driver, to spotters, to the pit crew, know exactly what they need to do, communicate clearly and execute flawlessly.

It’s the same with your business. To achieve your Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs), your team needs to be able to collaborate and execute flawlessly.

As a project leader, it’s my job to orchestrate the execution and help a company achieve its goals. After years of leading large and small projects, I’ve found a few core elements that will help you be more successful:

Be Clear About Your Goals

Traditional project managers create a project charter with a specific scope. While this is important in large, fixed projects such as construction, it doesn’t make sense for the small projects I’ve worked on.

On those instead, we focus on two things:

Vision and Roadmap

Make sure the entire team understands the vision for the project. This is often defined as a roadmap, with the vision for closer milestones clear and well defined, then less so for farther milestones.

Doing this allows the vision to refine throughout the project as it develops and you receive real-world feedback.

Measures of Success

Robert Murray of Incrementa’s favorite question is “What does good look like?”. Even if the vision is still being refined, you can have clear measures of success for each task or milestone of a project.

Doing so ensures that success is clearly defined for the team.

Get Project Management Tools

It’s very hard to organize, communicate, and drive success without a tool to do so. Even if I’m the only person working on a project, I use a project management tool.

If you’re working alone, something like Excel may be enough. Track your tasks, their dependencies, status, due dates and notes. For most projects, using a more powerful project management tool will enable collaboration with your team and will make the job of orchestrating success much easier.

Tools like Trello, Asana and Wrike offer a range of project management styles with very powerful collaboration features.

Engage and Communicate

There are few things that kill enthusiasm and reduces effectiveness as much as isolation. Project teams need to be engaged regularly. One of the Agile practices I love is the daily stand-up meeting. It’s quick, engaging, and focuses on elements that the team needs to know.

Everyone likes to be successful and see progress – measure it and celebrate it in these meetings.

Make sure people are empowered to ask questions and offer suggestions at any time. The best ideas often come from other members of the team.

Like the racing team whose success depends on every member executing perfectly, if you lead and manage your projects well, your team can execute at their best.

Mike is a Technology Strategist, Project Superhero and Cyber-Security Simplifier. He is a partner at Incrementa Consulting a boutique consulting firm dedicated to helping businesses be more successful. You can connect with Mike on Twitter, LinkedIn or the Incrementa website.