Wikipedia: Contemporary business and science treat a project as any undertaking, carried out individually or collaboratively and possibly involving research or design, that is carefully planned to achieve a particular aim. I will say that project management is often defined as planning, organizing, coordinating, leading, and control the resources to accomplish the objective – through multiple activities, and resources.

This objective (or objectives) needs to be clear. This is also defined as “end product” or “deliverables”. The project objective also includes: Benefits and outcomes.

Projects often have 7 project constrains:

  • Scope: Deliverables – “What needs to be done?” to satisfy the user/customer.
  • Quality: Expectations
  • Schedule: A table that specifies when each activity starts and finish (session, meetings, and tasks)
  • Budget: Based on estimated cost and resources.
  • Resources: Things and people needed to deliver the project.
  • Stakeholders: People who influence or have an opinion about the product.
  • Risks.

Project cycle

Every project has different phases and different milestones inside the project cycle:

THINKING PROCESS OR STRATEGY & IDEATION PROCESS

Research Phase:

  1. Framing: Identification of a need or problem (or opportunity)
  2. Hypothesis and Assumptions.
  3. Market Research: Understand the environment.
  4. User Profile and Needs: Understand end-user needs.
  5. Success criteria
  6. Criteria Identification: Develop a set of criteria against which the project will be evaluated (qualitative and quantitative criteria) This criterion needs to be aligned with the organization’s goals, vision, and mission statement.

Brainstorming Phase:

  1. Idea Generation: Everyone involved would evaluate the problem and find a solution to the problem – keeping in mind their personal knowledge. ( A lot of organizations jump directly to brainstorming)
  2. Brainstorming: Everyone gets together and come up with ideas.
  3. Idea Development: Build on top of existing ideas to develop a more mature idea.

Evaluation Phase: Evaluate each idea against the criteria and evaluate risks, processes, etc to ultimately accomplish the specific objective.

Team formation & Coaching Phase: People, skills, structure and midset needed to deliver the project.

Planning Discussions: Start planning and defining the project by discussing and making decisions about what, how, who, why, when.

** Use Nova to work, plan, automate and manage this process. You can also use additional tools for prototyping, meetings, etc like Figma and Miro.

**Use Nova to discuss your plan and strategy while having a LIVE and interactive document. Nova will help you track and save all your discussions and your decisions. This will save you time during the planning stage. With Nova, you can highlight the final ideas and keep your reports updated as you go without spending extra time writing or updating reports.

PLANNING

Take time to plan the project and provide information about what, how, who, why, when.

At this stage, the project is defined (also known as the proposal or project charter). Usually, the sponsor, customer, or stakeholder approves to move forward with the project after reading the project proposal. This proposal includes A project title, purpose, and justification of the project, description, objective, success criteria, funding, major deliverables, project schedule, acceptance criteria, milestones, constraints and assumptions, escalation plan, documentation, equipment, and approval requirements.

Some companies write a baseline plan or create Gantt charts: These documents usually show how to accomplish the project objective.

PERFORMING

Execute the plan and monitor and control progress.

**Use Project management tools during Planning and performing like Asana or ClickUp and Google drive or teams to write your baseline plan, or provide all the extra documents (equipment, overhead, escalation plan, profits, etc)

CLOSING

Varity of actions to finalize the project: payments, post-evaluation, lessons learned, etc…

**Use accounting tools like Wave to manage your payments and Nova to lead your post-evaluation and lesson learned sessions or meetings.

Must-do:

  1. Establish project objective: The objective must be agreed upon by the sponsor, stakeholders, or user and the organization that will perform the project.
  2. Create a Work breakdown structure (WBS): Subdivide the project scope into pieces or work packages.
  3. Define the scope: A project scope document must be prepared, ” What needs to be done?” A project scope document includes 1)Customer requirements, 2) Statment of work, 3) Deliverables, 4) Acceptance criteria, 5) Work breakdown structure (WBS) a hierarchical decomposition of the project work.
  4. Assign responsibility: The person, team, or organization responsible for each work item in the WSB must be identified in order to inform the project team of who is responsible and accountable for the performance of each work package and any associated deliverables.
  5. Define specific activities and a sequence of activities: Create a network diagram or a process that shows the necessary sequence and dependent relationships of the detailed activities that need to be performed to achieve the project objective.
  6. Estimate activity resources: Determine the type of resources such as the skills or expertise required to perform each activity as well as the quality of each resource that may be needed.
  7. Estimate activities duration: Make a time estimate for how long it will take to complete each activity, based on the estimate of the resources that will be applied.
  8. Develop a project schedule: Based on the estimated duration for each activity and the dependent relationships of the sequence of activities in the network diagram.
  9. Estimate activity costs: Activity costs should be based on types and quantities of resources for each activity as well as the appropriate labor cost or unit cost for each type of resource.
  10. Determine the budget: A total budget for the project can be developed by aggregating the cost estimate for each activity.

Lean project management or product development:

A work philosophy. This philosophy focuses in being very efficient and reduce the things that are no needed. The Lean philosophy also known as the lean thinking is applied during the process of innovation and we try to encourage this philosophy by providing an agile mindset. This is an iterative and flexible mindset so organizations can easily adapt to new changes, iterate solution and build solutions in blocks instead using the classic waterfall project and product development mindset.

This means that teams are often in the thinking and strategy process stage and need an agile way to iterate their plans.

At Nova, we want to automate the first stage of the project or product development making it simple, visual, agile, and tangible.

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