Groundwork for Project Success
By Janice Crotty Fraser
The best way to make a project successful is to start well. Bringing your project in on target is challenging, but certainly possible if you know how to go about it.
If you can learn to communicate your value effectively to project stakeholders, you'll produce more successful projects and advance your career. Your credibility is crucial, and the best way to gain credibility is to show that your projects are well grounded, well executed, and contribute materially to your company's success.
This article outlines a set of tools that will put you in a leadership position, make sure your projects meet business goals, increase the support for your work, and, in the end, improve your credibility.
Define Success
First, you need to know what a successful project looks like. Success means that you and your team create a great solution to an important problem, that the solution is implemented relatively quickly with an appropriate amount of time and money invested, and that everyone has some fun along the way. It's a low-stress, high-results vision of success where creative, technical, and business people are mutually respectful and work together to accomplish something neat.
Somehow, though, stuff always gets in the way—schedules crunch, people get laid off—and more often than not, the important people don't really notice that something good happened. Or, what's worse, they do notice but don't see the value in it. Let's say you're an art director presenting the work at a company meeting.
