Technology is a constantly changing field, and the demands from the end-users for agile and easy-to-use technologies have seen tech projects grow complex. IT projects are likely to experience time and budget overruns because they involve many people. In many cases, the stakeholders don’t understand the steps involved.
Carrying these complex projects over the finish line isn’t an easy task, but it can be done with proper management.
Discover:
- What it means to manage technology projects,
- Common challenges faced by IT project managers,
- Tips to make your next tech project a success,
- Why you should use project management software for your technology projects.
Let’s get straight to it.
What Is Technology Project Management?
Technology project management involves planning, managing, and executing an IT project. A technology project is a project that deals with information systems, tech infrastructure, or computers.
Tech projects can include software development and implementation, database management, web development, mobile app development, network configuration, hardware installation, and IT emergency recovery.
Responsibilities of a technology project manager typically include:
- Planning
- Scheduling and maintaining a timeline
- Execution
- Managing the budget
- Communicating with stakeholders
- Ongoing maintenance
To run effective project management for tech, managers require soft skills such as leadership, time management, and strategic thinking—in addition to industry knowledge and technical capabilities.
6 Phases of the Technology Project Management Process
To deliver complex IT projects effectively, break them down into these six phases:
Phase 1: Initiation
Begin your project by first defining why you need it. What’s the objective of this IT project? Write down a business plan, then conduct a feasibility study to ensure the project is viable for the team and company.
Phase 2: Planning
Once senior executives approve the project proposal, move the project to the planning phase. This stage outlines the project goals, requirements, scope, and risks. Create a project plan, determine resources, and set the budget.
Phase 3: Design
In the design phase, you determine how you’ll achieve the project goal. This process could involve creating multiple designs and prototypes. Once you choose a suitable design, develop specifications and share them with your development team.
Phase 4: Development
Next, assign tasks to your development team and select the project management tools you’ll use to manage your IT project. Additionally, outline technicalities and get your project resources together.
Phase 5: Implementation
The implementation or execution phase is where teams develop the final deliverable of the technology project. This phase tends to be the longest. Here, the project team sets out to complete their tasks while the manager monitors and manages the work, resources, cost, quality, and risk to ensure the project stays on track.
Phase 6: Follow Up
Once the team completes their tasks, the project manager delivers the final project to the customer. After delivery, the next phase is to follow up. Set up support teams, train the end-users, create a postmortem and ultimately end the project.
Unique Challenges of IT Project Management
Tech projects are often extensive in scope and, therefore, deal with various issues. These are some of the biggest challenges associated with managing IT projects and how to deal with them:
1. Time and budget overruns
Time and budget are some of the biggest challenges you may face when managing a tech project. Project resources are crucial to delivering your projects within time without compromising quality or going over budget.
However, often, project managers find themselves with inadequate resources to complete projects. This inadequacy can lead to prolonging projects which results in budget overruns.
Solution: To handle time and budgeting challenges prioritize resources planning to ensure that you have all the sources you need before kicking off your project. If you don’t have enough resources, you’ll be aware and prepare a more realistic timeline when taking on IT projects.
2. Changing technology
IT tends to be a volatile industry with technology becoming obsolete and new ones being innovated rapidly. Complex technology projects can take months or years to complete, and it may be challenging to ensure that your technology remains viable.
Solution: IT project managers must be prepared for inevitable change. Make sure that you have a flexible scope just in case your customer’s needs change midway.
3. Communication
Effective communication is a crucial element of any project, including IT. But, one out of three projects suffers from communication failure. Communication challenges in IT projects are driven by the fact that teams are often distributed and work remotely and in different time zones. IT managers must function as the go-between among these teams, other departments, and stakeholders. In the process, miscommunication can become a challenge if you don’t have a proper communication process.
Solution:
- Prioritize communication from the beginning of a project.
- Ensure that you have an organized process in place to keep everyone informed.
- Share frequent project status updates with all stakeholders to keep everyone on the same page throughout the project life cycle.
4. Transparency
Most managers believe that some aspects of the project should remain confidential. In projects run by such managers, information is not readily accessible to all stakeholders (other than the project manager and key stakeholders) and is on a need-to-know basis. This lack of transparency can lead to distrust and resentment among team members. Promoting a culture of openness and accountability in your team will make members feel more involved and valued, leading to better performance.
Solution: To promote transparency, set up a project management tool in which all team members can access all relevant information about your IT project quickly and efficiently.
5. Lack of an IT project management methodology
Many organizations aren’t applying project management to their projects. A project management methodology is a set of methods, principles, and rules for managing a project. IT projects could quickly go off-track and over budget without a proper process.
Solution: There are various project management methodologies. Choose one that will fit your project and team needs.
6. Distributed (and isolated) teams
As mentioned, most IT teams are distributed in different time zones. The rise of remote work has been a positive for companies and employees. However, managing remote teams can be challenging. IT project managers need to support remote teams, handle security issues, address hardware issues, and align schedules.
Solution: Have a system that enables you to easily schedule virtual meetings, provide updates, and keep in touch with your team.
7. Scope creep
Scope creep occurs when projects go beyond the original scope because stakeholders continue adding requirements and deliverables. Scope creep derails the project and leads to a demand for more attention and resources than initially projected. The extra resources will cause cost overruns.
Solution: Clearly outline project requirements and objectives from the beginning. In addition, have a change control process in place.
Tips for Running a Successful Technology Project
Ready to start managing your marketing projects better? These five-pointers could further help you avoid unnecessary pitfalls.
Tip #1: Understand your project
When managing tech projects, make sure that you understand them well. Know your stakeholders and understand their needs and preferences. Doing so will help you develop the best course of action so that project delivery matches and even exceeds expectations. Furthermore, have a clear awareness of project details and requirements.
Tip #2: Set realistic expectations
Once you’ve understood your stakeholders’ needs, set realistic expectations and discuss them with your project team. This enables the team working on the project to understand project needs and challenges better. By making your team part of the process, they can help determine the right solution, create a timeline, propose a budget, and address any challenges that may come up before the project kickoff.
Tip #3: Assign the right people
Know all your resources, their skills, experience, strengths, and weaknesses. Use this knowledge to assign tasks accordingly. Ignore the urge to assign the bulk of the tasks to tech experts with the most robust profiles. While this may be effective short term, it can backfire in the long run because the high-profile techies will burn out, stalling the project. Pair up experienced engineers with less experienced ones to create balance within the team.
Tip 4: Be a good communicator
Communication skills are crucial for every IT project manager. You need to communicate customer viewpoints and business workflows to your team. You’ll also be working with stakeholders outside the IT department who might not have any technical knowledge. You need to be able to communicate with them in a language they’re familiar with.
Keep your communication line open throughout the project life cycle to effectively manage tech projects. This will ensure that all stakeholders share and access regular updates on project progress, deadlines, new tasks, and any other factors that may affect the project. Proper communication keeps everyone on the same page and the project on track.
Tip 5: Have a risk management plan
You may plan everything to a T, but things could still go wrong. Hence why all your IT project management plans must include contingencies. A bump on the road could quickly turn into a disaster if you’re not prepared.
Map out a risk management plan with your team in advance so that when an issue occurs, you know which immediate steps to take to salvage the situation.
Why Technology Teams Should Use Project Management Software
Project management software helps IT managers to organize and control their projects so that they can increase efficiency.
Project management software can help you:
Monitor and track tasks
Project management software features tools that help monitor progress and performance hence boosting efficiency. Monitoring keeps your IT projects on track to meet tight schedules and budgets.
Prioritize projects
A project management solution allows you to map out each project’s ROI. Therefore, you can see which projects have the highest return on investment or the least risk and prioritize those.
Relay real-time status updates
Project management tools enable timely communication through tools like Kanban boards that support real-time updates. Additionally, team members can share updates and exchange information via chat instead of dealing with emails that could take a whole day to reply to. Real-time updates and easy access to information could eliminate bottlenecks and keeps project participants in the loop.
Consolidate all your files
Documentation is vital in any tech project—from initial requirements to requests and updates. You can store all your files (old and new) in your project management tool, where all team members can easily access them.
Manage tasks better
Task management can be tedious. From planning a task to assigning it to the correct member to monitoring its progress and confirming the team member completes that task successfully. Now imagine doing this for the many tasks involved in a tech project. A reliable solution will automate some of these processes while allowing you to organize and monitor all the tasks from one place.
Improve reporting and analytics
Reports are at the heart of tech projects and can be pretty time-consuming. Project management software can serve as a reporting tool that quickly collects any data you need, such as costs, performance, progress, etc. It can also generate accurate reports on just about any key performance indicator.
Get a real-time picture of the progress
Project management software gives you an updated overview of progress and project status. Each stakeholder can see this overview enabling them to know where the project is at any particular time. This real-time view enables teams to identify bottlenecks and address them before they go out of hand.
Generate and monitor budgets and expenses
Your project management tool can generate a detailed project budget. You can use the tool to monitor the project’s financial health and track actual costs while comparing them to the project budget. Furthermore, you can general financial reports and use them to forecast budgets for future projects.
How to Use Mission Control When Managing Technology Projects
A project management software like Mission Control can help your technology team enjoy all the benefits we’ve mentioned and more.
With its robust features, Mission Control enables you to:
- Keep all your tasks organized on a Gantt chart and visualize priority tasks, deadlines, and members handling each task.
- Track performance using Timesheets. Timesheets allow the project manager to see each team member’s workload and keep track of hours assigned and those utilized in completing tasks. You can quickly tell when to reallocate resources to keep the work moving ahead as planned.
- Make better data-driven decisions using reliable reports. You can quickly generate, filter, and share reports from your dashboard.
- Track your financial health using a collection of charts and graphs. The project financials feature enables you to maintain financial control and visibility in your projects. By keeping track of your finances, you can determine whether a project is profitable or not.
- Provide a reliable communication system for your team and other stakeholders. Mission Control enables instant communication via Chatter Feed. The tool is mobile-ready and can be accessed anywhere, making it the perfect tool to foster communication and collaboration among remote technology teams.
Ready to see how Mission Control can help you mange your technology projects better? Request a demo today.
