Businesses continue to ask for more IT performance with fewer resources and smaller budgets. Since resources are tight, IT leaders are finding it even trickier to keep IT projects on time and within budget. Following are a few key steps to help keep IT projects within the scope of the job—and more importantly—under budget:

1. Establish priorities: Without understanding the needs of your organization and placing proper priorities for those needs, you will find yourself in a sticky situation. Making use of your resources, specifically the executive champions on the teams, to help you organize the projects based on need is crucial. Take time to list out the priorities. Having it written down will allow you to clearly see dates, times and other important data about the project.
2. Outline most important steps: Once you have the clear overview, it is time to start putting things in order. Take the highest priority project first and build an outline. A tool like Microsoft Project is very beneficial, or use Word or Excel. Take the key aspects of the project and list them as the highest part of the project.
3. Iron out the details: Once the overview is complete, focus on the finer details. With this deeper dive, we can better understand the time or resources needed to support the project. It is important to understand that the more detail you add to this deep dive, the more precise your project timeline will be. By the time you get to this point, you will have a greater understanding of the entirety of the project, which will allow you to build out timelines and resource requirements.

Efficient project management is crucial to completing projects successfully. Which of the steps above have been the easiest as well as most challenging for your organization?

–Jason Minner