Basic principles of project management

While every project is unique in its own way, there are certain project management principles that apply to most projects. These are:

• project objectives
• project constraints
• project life cycle

These basic principles will give your project management process a solid foundation, help you to use tools and resources in an efficient way, and increase chances of successful project completion.

Project management objectives and goals

The main point of any project is to achieve specified business goals and objectives. You should establish from the start what it is that you want your project to accomplish. For example, if the project’s aim is to increase sales and profit, boost staff productivity, improve product or service quality, or something entirely else.

To be effective, your objectives should be as specific as possible. Something as vague as ‘improving customer relations’ is unlikely to be measurable. A better objective would be, for example, ‘to reduce customer complaints by 50 per cent’.

You may express your objectives as:

• outputs – eg a new building
• outcomes – eg staff relocating to a new building
• benefits – eg reduced travel, or simplified facilities management
• strategic objectives – eg increasing the organisation’s share price

Once the project fulfils its objectives, it ends. In most cases following project completion, the work moves into normal operations. It is therefore vital to any project that its goals and objectives are clearly defined, measurable and achievable.

Without this, your project may lack focus, you may not be able to measure your results accurately, and the project may fail to meet your business goals.

Project management constraints

A constraint is any restricting factor that can impact or limit the delivery of your project.

The three most significant project management constraints are:

• costs – how much money is available to achieve an outcome
• scope – what exactly is the expected outcome
• schedule – the timescales for delivering the output

Schedule, cost and scope are sometimes known as the triple constraint, or the project management triangle. Impact on either one of them may have an impact on the quality of your project, or even delivery.

Other common constraints include:

• quality – does the outcome match your project expectations
• resources – who will carry out the work, with what materials/resources
• risks – potential pitfalls and how to mitigate against them

Projects that do not honour their constraints tend to incur a significant cost to their business and often fail. If you need to change elements of your project, you may need to manage this carefully.

Even if all the constraints are balanced, issues can occur. You can apply some common change management principles to your project, to minimise risks and potential for failure.

Project life cycle

Projects have a definite start and finish point within which you should fullfill their objectives. This is known as the project life cycle. While this is usually defined by a start and finish date, the life cycle of a project can also be defined by a finite resource available to the project, such as money or fixed amount of staff time.

Any successful project will deliver its goals and objectives within the constraints and the life cycle of the project.

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