Best Practices in Project Management

Best Practices in Project Management
Sachithra Gayan Gunarathne
Sabaragamuwa University Of Sri Lanka
gayan_sac@yahoo.com
1
Abstract
Often, project managers have to monitor and many
projects concurrently. Unfortunately, some projects
were completed successfully but some were not
completed on time, over budget or being cancelled.
Some of the reasons of this project failure are: lack of
user involvement, lack of planning, incomplete
requirements, lack of resources, incorrect cost
estimation, just to name a few. There are many
project planning and scheduling techniques to
manage and help to ensure project success. Some of
these techniques, however, may not be suitable for
specific types of projects and thus, cause projects to
fail.
Grounded Theory is still regarded with skepticism as
a research methodology by many academics. The
whole Grounded Theory methodology can be seen in
operation and the concepts and categories can be seen
emerging from the data.
Keyword: Grounded Theory Methodology,
Practices, Project Management
Introduction
Project Management
The application of knowledge, skills, tools and
techniques to project activities in order to meet their
requirements. Managing a project comprises defining
goals and objectives through the planning and actions
control, activities, and tasks necessary to complete a
project successfully.
Practices in project management
The body of knowledge in project management, and
it is considered as a basic reference in this area being
"widely recognized" as the best practice, which
means that their knowledge and practices "are
applicable to most projects in most of the time and
that there is a consensus about their value and utility."
this does not mean that the knowledge described
should always be applied uniformly in all cases, that
is, the organization or the project management team
will determine what is appropriate or
Not, for a specific project.
Methodology
Developing a theory of project management best
practice
In the Grounded Theory Methodology, analysis look
for relationships and connections between the core
category and the other categories. This is known in
grounded theory as theoretical coding, a term coined
by Glaser and Strauss (1967). However, the four
categories of Managing the Customer, Managing the
Project Work, Managing Communications and
Managing Stakeholders are well known and well
established in the literature so no further comment
will be made in this text other than stating the
obvious that they must be included in project
management best practice. The three categories of
Awareing, Motivating and Knowledge Transfer are
interesting and less well documented in connection to
project management. A full analysis of the
relationships between all the categories is available
from the authors.
Awareing
This ties Awareing to all but two of the other
categories which shows its interconnectedness and
thereby its strong position in project management
best practice. However, in practice little notice is
taken of making people aware or of the PM being
aware. Thus, two types of awareness can be
distinguished: the PM’s awareness and other people’s
awareness (more appropriately called Stakeholder’s
awareness).
The PM’s awareness consists of four parts: PM’s
awareness of herself/himself, PM’s awareness of
stakeholders, PM’s awareness of project issues and
the PM’s awareness of Stakeholder’s awareness. Best
practice occurs when the PM considers all four
awarenesses.
Project stakeholders include development team
members, customers, top management, other PMs on
other projects within the organization, suppliers and
subcontractors. The concept of awareing
encapsulates the fact that a good PM has to manage
the awareness of all these people. In particular, the
PM has to manage the awareness of the customers by

gayan_sac@yahoo.com
2
appraising them at all times of risks, problems and
difficulties, project progress, need for communication
and need for clear requirements. It is not enough for
the PM to inform customers of these issues, the PM
has to make the customer aware. This is another
factor in project management best practice.
Similarly, the PM has to make the development team
aware of the project’s importance, context and
benefits, of the risks, of the need for internal
communication, of the customer’s changes to
requirements, and of the actual project work. All this
comes from the analysis.
Motivating
The category of Motivating has four concepts
regarded now as properties of motivating. These are
Responsibilising Self-motivation; Awareing the team
and Leadership. Responsibilising encapsulates
delegating responsibility (as well as project work)
and managing how team members handle that
responsibility. An ability to do this is regarded as a
contribution to project management best practice.
Any absence of self-motivation in a PM must have a
negative influence in project work and project
success, whereas good self-motivation will contribute
to project success. This is a subject worthy of future
research.
Awareing the project team of difficulties and
problems appeared to help the project workers avoid
problems rather than having to fix them after they
had occurred. Good leadership, good responsibilising
and high PM motivation will motivate the
development team, whereas poor leadership coupled
with poor responsibilising and low PM motivation
will inhibit a team’s motivation. Therefore good
leadership coupled with good responsibilising and
high PM motivation are key to project success and
therefore elements in best practice. However, the
three elements of good leadership, good
responsibilising and high PM motivation are tough
concepts and difficult to achieve in practice.
There emerged a strong connection between
motivation and being aware of motivation. The
relationship between these two parts defines the
connection between motivation and managing
awareness. The two parts are absorbed by each other,
their concepts transfer by osmosis.
Knowledge transfer
The PM has an important role in knowledge transfer
(KT) because it is the PM who has to make KT
happen. When KT does take place the PM has to be
aware of the possible difficulties in the actual process
of the transfer as well as the accuracy of the
knowledge itself. When KT does not happen, the PM
has to be aware of the lack of transfer and the need
for KT to happen.
Knowledge transfer can be informal in the work place
between team members or between the PM and
technical staff or higher management. Alternatively,
KT can be formal in the form of minutes of meetings
and official documents. From this research came the
concept of unused knowledge, that is where KT did
not take place for undisclosed reasons. Therefore KT
has properties of informal, formal, and unused. The
area of KT and its properties would make interesting
future research projects.
Research findings
Project Classification
Basically, projects can be classified into three
resolution types:
I. Project success: The project is completed on-time,
on-budget, fulfilled all functions and features as
specified.
Table 1: Project success factors

gayan_sac@yahoo.com
3
II. Project challenged:
The project is completed and operational but over-
budget, over the time estimate, and offers fewer
functions and features than originally specified.
III. Project impaired:
The project is cancelled at some point during the
development cycle.
Among these three types, the success rate was only
16.2%, while challenged projects accounted for
52.7%, and impaired (cancelled) was 31.1%.
Causes of project failure
Projects fail mainly because of unable to plan and
estimate correctly, or fail to implement the tasks
according to plan or failure causes by human factor.
The following sections explain these three causes of
failure:
I. Planning and Estimation factor:
This factor refers to initial cost and schedule
estimates are not revised when more information
becomes available as a project progresses. Also
plans are not used correctly or used to guide the
project forward, thus causing the project to fail.
II. Implementation factor:
This is caused by project scope changes, incorrect use
of project methodology, major changes in the
requirements and testing, and/or inspections are
poorly done.
III. Human factor:
Project managers are not trained to acquire the
necessary management skills. Also, some managers
are not able to apply and put the theory of project
management into practice. Poor communications are
also one of the human factors that cause a project to
fail.
Among these three factors, the major cause of project
failure is inappropriate use of project planning and
scheduling methodology. The next category of these
from the Standish report deals with projects that
proved to be “challenged,” that is they were
completed but were over budget, over time, or did not
contain all functions and features originally required.
Successful and challenged projects showed good
technical skills of the project managers, while failed
projects showed the project manager had only fair
skills. According to the 2002 Standish Report, three
top factors that impacted on not completed projects
are lack of user input, incomplete requirements and
specifications, and changing requirements and
specifications.
Table 2: Project challenged factors
Table 3: Project failed factors

gayan_sac@yahoo.com
4
Conclusion
This paper discusses about project success and
failure, the project classification and the factors that
contributed to project success and resulted in project
failure. Also, poor planning and scheduling are the
main reasons of project failure. Other important
issues that must not be neglected are the quality of
the team leaders and team spirits among the team
members.
The PM’s awareness of motivation is key to
motivating everyone else including the customer. It is
not enough for a PM to motivate the team, the PM
has to monitor and manage the state of the team’s
motivation. Good leadership combined with good
responsibilising and high PM motivation will
increase everyone else’s motivation and lead to
reduced risk of project failure. However, good
leadership, good responsibilising and high motivation
are all tough concepts which do not occur naturally
and need to be developed.
When the process of knowledge transfer is managed
well, knowledge will flow, accumulate and build up
and this will promote better management in the team,
the project work, the customer, other stakeholders
and every aspect of project management. Knowledge
transfer increases motivation and is an essential
element in good leadership.
References
I. Gray, C. F. and Larson, E. W. Project
Management: The managerial process. 4th Edition,
McGraw–Hill Educations, Singapore, (2008).
II. Ahern, T., & Leavy, B., Byrne, P.J. Complex
Project Management as Complex Problem Solving: a
distributed knowledge management perspective.
Elsevier: Ireland (2013).
III. Clancy, T. The Standish Group Report,
Retrieved Feb 20, 2008 from
http://www.projectsmart.co.uk/reports.html, Chaos
report, (1995).
IV. Allan, G.W., The Use of Grounded Theory as a
Research Method: warts & all, in: Ray Hackney (Ed.)
Proceedings of the International Symposium on
Research Methods, Tampa, USA, (2005).
Table 4: Issues of project management success

Best Practices in Project Management

More Related Content

What's hot

Viewers also liked

Similar to Best Practices in Project Management

More from Sachithra Gayan

Recently uploaded

Best Practices in Project Management