How to Improve Your Personal PM Practices?

Project management processes are defined as "the methods taken to complete a project". Put simply, they are the sets of activities that a Project Manager completes to initiate, plan, execute and close projects. Project Managers use processes to manage a project - whether these are personal processes or a common set of processes defined by your organization. You should periodically take a step back to refine your processes so that they become more and more effective over time. 

The process to improve your processes is not so hard. You can boil it down to three steps.

Step 1: Identify Your Current State Processes

It will be hard to improve your processes if you cannot identify them to begin with. The first step to take is to review your current project management processes and answer questions such as:

• Which processes do I have in place to manage my projects?
• Do these processes result in the desired outcomes?
• Who manages these processes?
• Have any issues or weaknesses been identified?
• Are my processes operating efficiently, without hassle?

Ideally, each process should result in the desired project outcome every time, without hassle. If you're not achieving this, then you will want to implement  improvements to improve them. 

Step 2: Identify Future State Improvements

With a clear understanding of the state of your current project processes, the next step is to identify any areas for improvement. Here is one way to do it:

• Look for problems, weaknesses or risks associated with your current processes.
• Compare those processes against the processes defined in the best practice project management methodology
• Identify enhancements/improvements based on the comparison of your weak processes versus a best practice model

By comparing your current processes against a best practice methodology such as MPMM, you can easily identify the areas for improvement. 

Step 3: Implement Process Improvements

Now that you have identified the process improvements, you will want to carefully think about how to implement them. You'll need to:

• Prioritize your improvements based on the intended benefits
• Add the process improvement work to your project schedule
• Communicate the improvements to your project team
• Implement the improvements according to your schedule
• Observe the improvements to see if they've had the desired effect

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Process improvement work takes time, diligence and patience to implement changes that help you to manage projects successfully every time.

Top Project Managers continuously review their processes to make sure that their projects are completed as quickly and efficiently as possible. Regardless of your current level of experience and knowledge, you will gain substantial benefit from performing continuous process improvement. It will certainly help you to achieve project management success.