There are lots of books, courses, experts, books and more that will tell you how to manage you project. We thought that we would share our top 5 simple steps for successful project management.

One Project Manager for One Project
If your project has 2 project managers then you have 2 projects! A well run, effective project needs one person at the top managing the project and making decisions. Decide who that person is and let them manage it.

Use an online project management tool
There are lots of them and if you have one project to manage you can normally get them for free. Basecamp offers a 1 project version for free.

If you can get every uploading their files, messages and dates to the online tool it makes things a lot easier. No more lost emails, no more lost files.

It might sound hard to set up but all of the technical work is done for you – you can reply via email and it goes straight to the tool. At the end of the project you can also create an archive of all of your emails and project documents.

Miss a day out of the office and you can just login to the system, no more trawling through emails to work out what are the ones that are important. With everything in one place it is a lot easier to manage your online files.

Talk to people, don’t hide behind email
Talk to people! A quick telephone call, video call, skype, or meet in person is normally much quicker than a long thread of emails. If you want to keep a record of it just confirm in email.

Manage your documents
You don’t need lots of documents, just good ones.

At the start of the project release your document rules and the documents that everyone is going to use. If you don’t want people to use track changes just politely tell them. We make sure that every document has a cover page and every time there is a change we increase the version number and this is replicated in the file name.

Get every to use the same file format.

For example: Project Name – Project Report v1.0 110211

It makes it a lot easier if you all follow the same rules.

Agree the start and the end
At the start of the project agree what you are going to be producing and when. Also agree what the quality criteria is going to be and what you will do if it what meet it.