All successful enterprises share one common thing — having a strong project Management foundation. The more complex an organization is, the bigger impact it will have to the entire operation. Project management is something beyond shared calendar and meetings. This article is going to provide 5 powerful tips from beginning to end to help anyone who is involved in projects succeed.

What is Enterprise Project Management?

Enterprise Project Management (EPM) in general refers to a type of project management at a company-wide or cross-team scale. EPM is crucial in many aspects of making a company run as smoothly as possible. What makes EPM different is that instead of referring to a single, small-scale project, an enterprise project usually focuses on the organizational level, prioritizing business goals and broader company initiatives and objectives.

Why is Enterprise Project Management important?

When a large-scale and cross-department project is taking place, not having a solid plan to oversee and track the progress can result in wasted efforts, duplication of work, communication gaps, inconsistent quality, delayed milestones, and worst of all — a discouraged group of employees that lose their motivation.

Whether you’re an EPM veteran or just beginning to get involved, here are 6 tips to help improve enterprise project management for you and your company.

1. Spend extra time on the initial planning and goal setting

Planning is crucial to the success of a company-wide project involving many parties and elements, but its importance and impact are often overlooked. Sure, the project scopes and requirements could frequently change, making the execution and resource alignment challenging for project owners to follow through. However, if the project objectives deviate too far from what was initially planned, then the entire team needs to seriously rethink whether the changes are legitimate and justified. Luckily, there are a few tips to help you ace the initial planning stage and avoid some of the consequences caused by unclear planning and communication.

• Defining your goals and objectives: make sure that as a project manager or stakeholders, aligning the big picture goals and objectives is integral to your future success. Goals and objectives loosely defined can be catastrophic because you won’t have anything to come back to when you need to make difficult decisions later on. What are your core pillars that shouldn’t be deviated from? What are the bottom lines that need to be top of mind when the scopes need to change due to unexpected circumstances (such as COVID-19)? This stage could take a few weeks and even months to get things right, as it’s going to be the foundation and north star for everyone going forward.
• Set milestones and checkpoints: once you have the overall directions and core pillars written down (and agreed by all parties and stakeholders), you will need to set milestones. Having milestones is equally as important as having the core pillars. First, a complex project could take years from start to finish, and you will need to break them up into stages; otherwise, you will very quickly lose track of the progress. Second, reaching milestones means success at different stages. The final delivery is determined by a series of milestones and successes. When a milestone is reached, you should take the time to congratulate yourself and the people involved to let them know that things are on track and everyone’s efforts are paying off.
• Conduct risk analysis: analyzing your risks and having mitigation plans can make or break your project. Project leaders and stakeholders need to understand fully where the risks are and have concrete plans in place, so the progress doesn’t get derailed or unnecessary costs incurred by not foreseeing the risks and being slow to respond to them.
• Look at previous issues and learn from the mistakes: before everyone jumps in and starts working, as project leaders, you must seek advice from colleagues and other project leaders with experience on some of the challenges and issues. Even though you may not resolve everything before a new project occurs, it will undoubtedly prepare you for what’s coming and how you can get ready. You can try to be as prepared as you can, which gives you confidence and makes the project less daunting.
• Explore different project management methodologies: as a project leader or manager, one of your key tasks is to decide how the project will get conducted and executed. There are many popular project management methodologies currently used by organizations worldwide.

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2. Having an open and clear communication culture and channel

The project planning can be done by a few people, but actually getting everything done as per plan requires everyone’s involvement. Some even say that having “over-communication” can actually help you go a long way when done right. The downside to having a bad communication structure can lead to deviation from the objectives, failure to refine over time, or transparency gaps.

• Setting the culture and encouraging open communication: whether or not people involved in the project can establish open communication depends on the tone you set right from the beginning. As a project manager or leader, one of your jobs is to bring in a culture for everyone to express their opinions, whether it’s positive or negative. The process of getting everyone on board will take time, but it’s very crucial as you can’t possibly monitor every single detail. You will be relying on other project managers and stakeholders to actively call meetings, exchange information, and discuss feedback. You can lead by example and invite everyone to share their feedback during weekly meetings, so people will become more accustomed to speaking their thoughts.
• Make information available and easily accessible: the transparency of an enterprise project is a tricky one. For a large organization, some information may be on a need-to-know basis, making it difficult for people to access the information they need readily. Then you should definitely put in place a team or someone who is able to parse the information and be the bridge between different stakeholders and teams. Try to avoid hiding information to protect your own interest as this could potentially lead to redundant work, unnecessary time spent, and disgruntled employees. If your project can be transparent, then you could ask for feedback as to what kind of information should be made available that can help the most people.
• Use collaboration & communication tools to increase productivity: nowadays simply using emails and offline documents no longer fit the fast-paced nature of project management. As a project manager or leader, it’s also in your best interest to identify the best collaboration tools, like project management software, that can supercharge everyone’s productivity and streamline everything from communication, information sharing, feedback loops, and more.

> Project management & collaboration tools: you can look into tools like ProofHub, Asana, Trello, or Monday. These tools specialize in project management, task assignment, progress tracking, and integration with your existing platforms like emails and Instant Messaging apps.

> Communication tools: tools specifically designed for communication includes Slack or Microsoft Team, both of which support a wide range of integration so you can streamline your project operations instead of asking members to manage more tools than they can handle.

3. Tracking your progress and try to get everyone to be on the same page

The key to successful project management, especially at the enterprise level, is almost always going to be time and progress management. As a project manager or Leader, this is going to take up most of your time. Tracking progress gives you a better understanding of the project in its different phases, resource allocation, and each team’s status. Another key component in tracking progress is the aforementioned milestones. Having milestones not only helps you evaluate progress but also acknowledges the team’s efforts. Here are some tips to help you master progress tracking:

• Weekly reports & meetings: even though everyone doesn’t like meetings and writing reports when done well and efficiently, these are great ways to help stakeholders be on the same page. As project leaders, you should clearly define what should and should not be included in the reports. When conducting meetings, be prepared to act as the facilitator and avoid spending hours on meetings without results.
• Having a sound escalation process: after the project is kicked off, along the way, there are going to be challenges and issues that need to be dealt with. One of the things that are part of risk management is knowing when to escalate issues to your superiors or stakeholders who need the information to make a decision. As a project manager, you need to be professional and timely with escalation. Knowing the right escalation techniques is vital to clearing out the obstacles. This includes preparing the correct information, finding the right person and the right time. Although escalation effectively moves things forward, effectively using the project mentioned above management tools can also be extremely helpful without always going with the escalation route.
• Two-way communication & feedback: reporting and feedback shouldn’t be just one-way and bottom-up. As a project manager or leader, try your best to involve upper management and decision-makers to engage with various stakeholders and team members. When it comes to checkpoints and milestones, it’s important to constantly align the direction so the project can stay on the right course. For upper management, positive or negative feedback can be time-saving and effective, as the teams won’t need to spend unnecessary time doing things that aren’t aligned with the project directions.

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4. Empower your teams with technologies and tools

In order for an enterprise project to succeed, it’s important to ensure that everyone working on the project has all the tools they need to make things happen. The scope of the project often is bigger than we think and involves more teams than we think. For example, the IT & support team needs to make sure that all the internal systems, services, and devices are working properly. As we’re moving toward a remote workforce and environment, the dependency on network stability, data and information availability, as well as working devices are becoming on the top of the priority list for any organization. Here are some technologies and tools that you can look into to help with any project:

• Mobile technologies for the remote workforce: one of the trends after the pandemic is the rise of mobile devices, along with the expansion to cloud services that power data and analytics for almost every aspect of an organization’s operations. For example, developers working on a company-wide project at home are going to require devices (desktop and mobile), so having a service like a mobile device management solution to see an overview of every device is something worth considering. When an employee’s mobile device isn’t working, IT support is able to remotely access the device and fix the issue right away.
• Video conferencing and meeting: another tool that’s crucial in today’s remote environment is equipping your teams with video conferencing software and tools. Make it easy for everyone involved in the project to communicate on-demand. Again this circles back to also providing employees with devices, so even when they are out, they can still use a mobile device to participate in meetings or access online resources. As more and more companies are allowing employees to work remotely, having video conferencing is one of the essential tools in order for a project to move forward at any stage.

5. Team growth and motivating everyone involved in the project

There are many techniques, methodologies, technologies, and tools to help improve the execution of a project. However, the employees are at the center of every project, and it’s important to make sure that you have the right people working for the right reasons. When the participants are motivated, focused, and aligned with the goals and objectives, it will be much easier for everything to fall into place. Here are some tips that any project manager or leader should definitely think about before and during the project:

• Identify the strengths and weaknesses of everyone: whether it’s picking the right members for the project or switching roles, a project manager or leader needs to know each person’s strengths and weaknesses to get the best and most out of everyone.
• Foster good relationships: having a toxic work environment with office politics, backstabbing, and gossiping is a formula for a failed project. Fostering a diverse and healthy work environment shouldn’t be overlooked. Hosting workshops, team-building activities, lunches, and dinners, are just some of the ways to boost morale.
• Encourage personal growth: when selecting the right teams and members for the project, personal growth can also be considered and encouraged for everyone. Sometimes a project can take up to 3 or 4 years to complete. Many members have the opportunity to switch roles and change teams during this period. Encouraging employees to develop interest and passion for different things can also bring positive energy and results to a project.
• Appreciate the efforts by everyone involved: finally, as project managers and leaders, you need to always keep in mind that a project doesn’t get done without everyone involved giving their time and efforts. It’s always nice to appropriately acknowledge and appreciate the efforts on a regular basis, even when things are going well. Having the right amount of motivation and appreciation can go a long way for everyone involved to want to deliver the project on time, with good quality.

The above best practices and tips can be applied to all scales of project management. The most challenging part is having the mindset and willingness to see it through. For project leaders and senior management, it’s making sure that the culture is built from day one and providing the necessary resources to empower everyone to succeed. For members of a project, it’s about putting in equal effort as everyone else and trying your best to influence others along the way. At the end of the day, it’s the people who drive the project and turn a concept into real results.

Author Bio:

Mark Hong, Global Marketing Manager at Sand Studio, a provider of mobile device management, kiosk lockdown, application management, and location tracking solutions. Mark is a tech enthusiast and evangelist of software and IT solutions. Here is his LinkedIn profile.

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