5 Crucial Steps to an Iron-Clad Project Plan (that no one talks about):

Every successful project begins with a stellar project plan. To help make sure you set yourself up for success, here are five crucial steps to follow for an iron-clad plan:

1. Understand your objectives

Before you can plan, you need to know what your objectives are. Figuring them out takes communication and collaboration so that you can determine clear goals that everyone agrees to. Make sure you have a smart platform in place that can facilitate this.

2. Plan for unforeseen situations

Anytime you’re dealing with clients, things happen—and sometimes they’re not so pleasant. That’s why it’s really critical to have an easy way to manage dynamically changing situations. Managing your projects, client expectations, and the bumps in the road that occur is hard enough—make sure you have a dynamic platform implemented that’ll let you address any challenge, strategically.

3. Set milestones

When you’re planning your project, you need to set milestones. They let everyone see when things are off track so that problems don’t go unnoticed. The key to simplifying this process and keeping everyone on track though is to have a complete overview of your project—one that dynamically adjusts as milestones are set and reached.

4. Have a way to track and store client communication

It’s unsurprising that so many projects fail due to poor communication. Make sure you have a way to track and store client-related communication that’s easily accessible. That way, you can avoid email mayhem with its CC’s and FYIs by having everything streamlined in one simple place.

5. Allocate the resources

It isn’t possible to finalize a project if you don’t take into account all of the resources you’ll need to see the project through to completion (think: staff, skill sets, budget and time). Figuring this out can be daunting, but with a smart technology platform that lets you see your team’s schedule, the project’s budget, and the allocated timeframe (all in real-time), you’ll be able to forecast with confidence.

If you have a project looming and you’re looking for something to give you a kickstart to success, check this out.