As promised, here’s part 1 of the follow up to our talk, “Building a Better Death Star,” at EMPOWER 2018. This blog will cover Imperial Best Practices: Building Project Plans. Bear in mind that a lot of these are very common project management processes for project management professionals but are hard to institute without Quick Base.
Alright, grab your light saber and let’s get started.
- Understand the goals and deadline of the project
Need to make sure goals are well communicated as well as the deadlines and constraints. The best way to do this is to start with the end in mind. Keeping that big picture view can help everything proceed more smoothly. - Document project risks and opportunities and mitigation plans
As with any project, it’s important to go into it with eyes wide open. You need to understand your risks and how to mitigate those risks to make them a living part of your project. Be aware of all the possible things you’ll run into, whether it’s resource constraints or technology constraints—things that you can’t predict. - Determine the main phases of the project
Breaking the project into pieces of manageable chunks of work that are important from a high level is key. This is where Quick Base itself can really come in handy because it’s a great tool for managing other Quick Base projects. It lets you share the plan and get input and collaboration from everyone. - Assign single ownership to each task but include tasks for management check points
Collaboration is great because it lets you have multiple people working on a task, but Quick Base can help create a single owner of accountability that fixes a lot of communication problems. - Think through every task to be completed within each phase and how tasks affect each other (dependencies)
We’re currently building a Lean Planning process called a Pull Plan. In essence, this lets you create a plan and work backwards with what you need to create that plan, and then by date you start working forward on that plan. In Lean Planning, it’s all about two things: what do you promise and what do you need? What do you need to do your task and what can you promise you’ll deliver? With the use of Quick Base add-ons like the Resource Forecasting Gantt chart, you can easily map out those dependencies so you stay as efficient as possible. - Templatize if possible for repeatability
Quick Base ProjectCart lets you take common project types and rebuild those projects to save you time and thought. You can utilize an old plan and then pick and choose what you need, or don’t, from that template.
That’s about all you need to know to be a Quick Base Project Management Jedi. Be sure to check back for part 2 coming up next month.