Your complete guide to project management in 2023

If you need to deliver projects on time and within budget while satisfying all stakeholders, then efficient project management is a must-have.

But what does best-practice project management look like, what are the best frameworks to use, and what features make or break the software you choose?

In this guide, you’ll learn about project management processes, the best frameworks, and how to effectively use project management — starting with some project management basics.

What is project management?

Essentially, project management (PM) is a framework to guide your team to success—this includes your team objectives, tools, and techniques both over the long-term and your day-to-day work.

Why is project management important? 

Most experts agree that project management is important because it provides the leadership, motivation, and problem-solving that help teams introduce new products or services, grow revenue, and meet company goals.

If you prioritize effective project management styles and frameworks, you can proactively and continuously improve workflows to avoid mistakes and overspend.

Now that we’ve covered what it is and project management importance, let’s explore the five stages of project management to help you get started.

What are the 5 stages of project management?

Thankfully, there’s a simple roadmap you can follow for successful project management. As Matt Burns, a project manager at staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud says:

“The number one thing to do before initiating any project is to outline the project roadmap at the beginning. Because if you want to go somewhere and you don’t have this map, you’re probably going to get lost.”

And this is why the first step should always be to identify expectations up front.

This is exactly how the Project Management Institute (PMI) starts its project management process. Let’s dive into into the five phases that are relatively well-agreed upon in the project management space:

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While entire books have been written on the above structure and what each step comprises of— we’ll give you the high-level information you really need to know:

1. Initiating

As with any good project, preparation is vital to ensure it will be completed on time and within budget. During the project initiation phase, determine the following to create the project foundation:

• Project scope: the specific limits and boundaries for the project. It essentially covers what will be accomplished in the project and what will not (i.e project objectives). Establishing these boundaries prevents something called “scope creep.”
• High-level project overview: This considers the resources, time, and goals required to complete a project. Included in the overview is a way to monitor these requirements over time.
• Budgets: How much is needed to achieve a successful project?

For larger projects, a project charter or “Project Initiation Documentation” (PID) might be established.

2. Planning

During the project planning phase, it’s time to set key milestones and dates, including the final project completion date. When you get clear and intentional about project timing, you can ensure all team members move towards the same goal.

During this process, it’s important to outline which project management methodology the team will follow. There are many to choose from – to name a few of the more popular ones:

• Agile
• Waterfall
• PRINCE2
• PMBOK
• Scrum
• Lean
• Kanban

We’ll get into more specifics around some of these later in this guide.

It’s also important to mention that the planning phase also includes:

• Selecting the team members
• Outlining deliverables
• Estimating resources
• Determining associated activities

Once these are in place, you can start executing.

3. Executing

At this point, it’s all about getting stuff done. During the project execution phase, you will carry out the details of your project plan (or project deliverables) to deliver your products to your specific stakeholders. This stage occurs simultaneously with the monitoring and controlling phase and might involve:

• Managing workflows
• Recommending changes
• Suggesting corrective actions

Ultimately, it’s about staying in control, collaborating with the entire team, and staying on track.

4. Monitoring/Controlling

This is crucial in any project life cycle as it helps project managers answer the question: where are we at any given point in the project vs. where should we be according to the project plan? Effective monitoring requires:

• Regular, consistent project “check-ins”
• Use of proper project documentation and tracking tools or frameworks (such as Kanban boards, Gantt charts, and team stand-ups).

The more visual and real-time this is, the better.

5. Closing

This final step, sometimes known as “project delivery,” or project closeout phase is when you wrap up all activities and deliver the final product to the client (an internal team or external stakeholder).

Some additional components could be:

• Conclusion of any formal contracts or agreements
• A full review or audit of what went well, what didn’t go as planned, and how future teams and projects could learn from this one.

Now that you understand the basic stages of project management, it’s important to be clear on the four project management types.

What are the four types of project management?

There are several project management types and frameworks you can use to manage projects, successfully. Choosing the right one is crucial because it dictates how you structure your team and how you plan and monitor your projects.

As promised, here are high-level descriptions of the leading project management frameworks (with links to even more comprehensive deep-dives).

We also have a great blog on top project management methodologies to further help you understand your options.

1. Waterfall project management

Waterfall or traditional project management is focused on “perfect planning.” Before you even get started, you break down and schedule the entire project from start to finish.

If you’re working with physical products with lots of dependencies or services where your SLA demands perfection, consistency, and set-in-stone deadlines, there’s no better alternative.

Check out our complete guide to Waterfall project management here.

2. Kanban project management

Unlike the Waterfall framework, Kanban project management focuses on continuous improvement. Using a Kanban board like the one above, your team plans how to improve products, campaigns, or processes.

Kanban helps you visualize your work to limit work-in-progress (WIP) and quickly move work from “Doing” to “Done.” Kanban is great for teams that have many incoming requests.

To learn more about Kanban project management, check out our guide.

3. Scrum project management

The Scrum framework is the most popular way to implement Agile project management. It divides larger projects into shorter, 1–4 week sprints that adapt to demands as the project evolves.

It also lays out rules for team size, team roles, planning, meetings, deliverables, and more. While popular among software developers, it’s also great for teams that seek to deliver functioning increments of their work during a project. For example, you could use it for marketing campaigns, product design, or other creative projects.

Read our post on the Scrum methodology to learn more.

4. Agile project management

Agile is a project management buzzword and is often prescribed as a catch-all solution to inefficient companies. However, it has its own unique shortcomings, including scope creep and collaboration issues.

For example, it can be hard to scale this framework beyond a smaller team level because it relies on smaller increments and details. On the other hand, for many teams, having the flexibility to amend project plans as time goes on is integral to ensuring they can finish the project, period.

To learn more about running your next project using an agile framework, check out our walkthrough.

Let’s get into some best practice tips for successful project management.

8 tips for successful project management

With solid project management, companies can develop new products or services, optimize internal business operations, and provide customers with value — all with less friction and more efficiency. However, without the right building blocks in place,  a lack of innovation and a drain on time and money can quickly follow suit.

To help you succeed with project management, we’ve put together eight tips to propel your organization instead of holding it back:

1. Invest in the initiation and planning stages
2. Pick the right framework or methodology for your project
3. Promote a culture of transparency and ownership
4. Decide on a realistic scope
5. Prioritize efficient scheduling
6. Practice effective resource management
7. Engage your stakeholders
8. Choose next-level project management tools and software

Let’s delve into each one to understand why they are so important together with best practice tips.

1. Invest in the initiation and planning stages

When it comes to answering, “Why do projects fail?”, many of the reasons can be traced back to poor planning and research—crucial parts of the initiating and planning stages of the project life cycle.

By establishing, syncing, and agreeing on key aspects such as organizational priorities, objectives, and requirements early on, there is less of a chance for confusion on them later.

2. Pick the right framework or methodology for your project

The second step toward successful project management is finding the right framework or methodology. Project management methodologies describe a set of guiding principles and processes that are used to plan, manage, and execute projects.

Whether you choose the critical path methodology or Waterfall, these frameworks determines how work is prioritized and completed, as well as the way it is visualized.

3. Promote a culture of transparency and ownership

Transparency can make all the difference when managing a project as complexities and sensitivities arise. With a strong culture of transparency in place, team members and leaders can rely on each other to raise flags or take ownership of their work regardless of how granular or stressful plans get.

This starts with clear communication, so each contributor can understand your long-term goals, KPIs (key performance indicators), and plans—as well as where they fit into the puzzle. One way to achieve this is to involve every employee at some level in the planning process, and give them ownership over tasks and deliverables by using a solid project management workflow, which you can create with a Work OS platform, like staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud – more on this later.

4. Decide on a realistic scope

Scope creep, which is essentially unforeseen work or changes to plans that come up, is one of the main challenges project managers face. While this could be related to uncontrollable factors throughout a project, having the right people at the planning table can help you more accurately define project scope that prevents things from going off track.

One way you can set realistic scope is to refer back to old project data to make projections.

5. Prioritize efficient scheduling

If you want your team to stay productive, you need to create work schedules that are realistic to your team’s workloads and the intended delivery date. Balancing these two factors is a worthwhile investment of your time.

Fundamentally, clearly communicated schedules mitigate delays and costly setbacks. The type of project management methodology you use shapes communication and can affect the way your team uses its time to reach a goal. If you use an Agile framework like Scrum, you will focus on the short-term and smaller deliverable increments. It’s also important to schedule time for things you don’t plan for.

With a Work OS like staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud, you can see individual or team workloads with Workload View in the same workspace that you manage calendars, timelines, and resources.

6. Practice effective resource management

Resource management is an important tenet of project management and describes the process of pre-planning, scheduling, and allocating your resources to maximize efficiency.

In the physical sense, resource management could be explained through the example of a contractor managing construction projects — they could decide to book a concrete pourer for two sites in lieu of having to pay the cost for two at the same time.

For digital projects, resources often refer to specific employees or teams. A graphic designer may have several concurrent projects, so you’ll need to plan with them in order to get the job done. The list goes on to include any number of resources including people, capital, and other material goods.

7. Engage your stakeholders

A stakeholder is someone directly invested in the project’s success. They could be a key client, internal product user, executive, or product manager. In order to garner their support—financial or otherwise— that fuels a project, teams and project managers shouldn’t skimp on any work needed for their projects.

Communication and input between these two parties should be established before, during, and after a project. Why? Because each offers unique insights and perspectives relative to the organization’s goals and the team’s capabilities. A Work OS with robust features will help you to present important data and timelines in real-time you can refer back to again and again.

8. Choose next-level project management tools and software

Finally, to succeed in the modern world of remote work, inter-departmental collaboration, cloud file sharing, and 1,000 other variables unique to your company, you need a modern Work OS platform. This is where staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud comes in. In short, staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud offers a complete toolkit for every project and is built on an easy-to-use Work OS.

staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud Work OS lets you shape workflows your way, boosting your team’s efficiency, and productivity by customizing any workflow to fit your needs. This gives you the freedom to work in whatever project management framework you prefer. With views ranging from our custom table (with color-coded statuses) to Kanban board, Gantt chart, Timeline, and Calendar Views, you can truly customize the experience to your workflow.

You can also seamlessly integrate staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud with other tools in your tech stack, and share boards, project status dashboards, and project updates with your entire team in real time.

You can get started with staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud now, or keep reading to learn more about how to get the most out of project management software.

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6 steps to get the most out of project management software

While spreadsheets, email, and whiteboards could suffice for very simple and small-scale projects, large and complex projects require a robust project management platform to succeed.

staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud gives you all the functionality you need, from platform-specific templates, boards, and workflow automations to collaboration tool integrations.

Here’s how you can set up a digital workspace like staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud Work OS to empower your project teams.

1. Use project documentation to speed up framework adoption

Project documentation is the practice of recording key project details and documents required to successfully implement projects. If you are bringing multiple teams together in a specific project methodology, it’s important to make documentation clear and understandable for everyone.

With a Work OS, you can create, share, and collaborate on documents right from within your workflow—or larger workspace. For example, on staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud’s workdocs, team members can explore and understand in real-time the flow of a project and their part.

2. Create your roadmap and high-level project plan

A project roadmap is a visual, high-level overview of a project’s goals and deliverables organized on a timeline. This is an incredibly useful tool for managing stakeholder expectations, as well as for communicating plans and coordinating resources with other teams.

Plus, project management software allows you to create a living and dynamic document that everyone can easily access. Better yet, project roadmap templates like this one from staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud can help you get started even faster.

3. Build an awesome workflow

Once you have a roadmap or some other form of high-level project plan, it’s time to get more granular with your workflows. This is crucial, as it makes it easy and intuitive for your team members to execute their work and for project managers to monitor and control project progress.

The advantage of using a Work OS over traditional project management software is that you can start with solid templates and quickly customize them to accommodate different project methodologies, add different views, automations, and more.

With staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud you can build any kind of workflow from work breakdown structures (WBS) to risk registers, resource management, and project proposals.

4. Encourage ownership

On staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud, the People Column serves for easy assignment of tasks and subtasks to individual employees and teams—some project management software will only let you choose individual owners.

• Columns empower project managers and individuals to assign work and see it through.
• You can even implement automations that send notifications to task owners when a phase of the project is complete.

In addition to assigning task owners, it’s also a good idea to give each team member simple responsibilities like reporting on progress during status meetings and identifying their own roadblocks. This helps maintain a culture of transparency and builds momentum.

5. Get dedicated to data-driven decision making

Take your projects to the next level with actionable insights. Depending on which solution you choose, we included a few features that will help you get the most out of your data:

• Time Tracking Column: This allows teams to see how long tasks take.
• Customizable Status Column: Any stakeholder can see where your projects get held up the most.
• Deadline Column: holds every team member accountable to the project’s success.

Once you’ve created different workflows, use them as a resource and easily create reports and dashboards.  Assess project success against KPIs—this data can then be used to guide decisions or new projects.

6. Automate repetitive tasks to speed up project management

Automations can speed up your workflow for more efficient project management. For example, you can notify managers automatically when due dates are passed, create a new task item every week, and more. You can choose from pre-prepared automation templates or create your own automated workflows.

Why use staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud for project management?

In short, staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud’s Work OS goes beyond project management software because it allows teams to manage all projects and tasks in a single place.

Our solution means teams can:

• See project progress at a glance
• Stay on top of schedules and deadlines
• Collaborate more efficiently and effectively
• Build their dream workflows

Try our platform now, the first two weeks are on us. To dive in right away, check out our project management template:

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Or keep reading to learn more about project management trends and how to build a productive project management team.

The future of project management: key trends to watch

Many project management trends are shaping how we work. For instance, there is a lot of buzz around artificial intelligence (AI) and its implications in the project management sector by automating repetitive tasks and uncovering key insights.

The power of innovations like AI are well documented by industry professionals. Take world-renowned technology writer, Peter Giffen:

“AI could incorporate data analytics and automatically analyze project team data, providing clear indications about how to improve performance.”

In addition to AI, there are three other project management trends we can expect in the near future:

1. Project managers will need both AI and EI skills: EI — emotional intelligence — is becoming a required skill in the PM space. The ability to understand other humans is critical. Read this article for other essential project management skills.
2. Adoption of customized or hybrid PM approaches: Gone are the days where a single PM methodology will suffice. It’s likely that models will need to be flexible to accommodate different teams and various projects.
3. A more diverse team structure: As mentioned above, your team will grow more diverse. Though ultimately a positive trend, increasingly diverse teams will also create a broad range of challenges as teams collaborate effectively and efficiently.

We’ve covered the project management phases, its frameworks, tips for success, and future trends, but what about the key players who will take the project from A-Z? We’re talking, of course, about your team.

With all this in mind, let’s now look at how to ensure you choose the right people for the project.

How can you build a productive project management team?

People are core part of strong project management, we’ve touched on why in the top tips, but let’s go into this in a bit more detail.

How you structure your project team largely depends on your framework and the scope of your project. The good news is, there are a few proven strategies for building a successful and productive team.

1. Recruit talent across departments

Your project team will likely come from different departments because projects benefit from and require varied expertise and input.

Instead of hiring new talent, you can utilize existing resources and sync multiple departments on a larger organizational goal. For example, a new marketing campaign could require website designers, copywriters, and product managers.

2. Choose a project manager wisely and define responsibilities accurately

A project manager could be a professional PM or a subject matter expert (SME) — someone who’s extremely knowledgeable in the area of the project. You can see here a breakdown of who typically wears the project manager hat.

A professional PM might play more of a facilitating role during initial planning. They give room to stakeholders and SMEs to shape the project plan with their hands-on experience. Smaller companies may not be able to afford a dedicated project manager role, in which case, an SME or executive is the logical choice.

What does a project manager do?

A project manager might look different from team to team, but overall they are responsible for day-to-day management of a project and its people. They must also manage these six aspects:

• Scope
• Schedule
• Finance
• Risk
• Quality
• Resources

3. Set an “all hands on deck” expectation

Empower your team members to exercise their own judgment and push forward by encouraging task ownership and providing complete transparency of what’s expected in the project’s early stages. And with remote working on the rise – you’ll also need flexible tools to accommodate different teams and various projects.

This is where the right project management software comes in. A tool like staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud makes it easy to collaborate with team members, break down silos, and achieve more.

Create workflows your way with staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud

To wrap-up, successful project management requires an understanding of the right approach to meet your needs and how to match this up with the right Work OS platform. staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud Work OS offers a comprehensive set of features to help you easily manage any type of project management methodology. As a bonus, there are plenty of templates to help get you started. Why not sign up today to see for yourself?

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