Whether you’re approaching year end or a sharp deadline, how do you complete a project without rushing the details? Here are 6 actions you can take to help effectively finalize IT projects on time:

1. Review Project Status

Reviewing the status of an IT project is essential in determining what tasks necessary to perform remain. This affects your progress, timeline, stakeholders, and decisions. This step is especially important if a project is being assigned to you partially completed.  A good example of a project for which a status update is critical is setting up new security controls, because the status will indicate when it is necessary to remove old firewalls and intrusion detection systems- you don’t want your devices without a firewall for any period of time! In most cases, a quick review will get you on track and help determine your next steps.

2. Use A Criteria To Make Decisions

With a sharp deadline around the corner, everyone must be on the same page; otherwise, projects can hit roadblocks that can cause extensive delays. To avoid wasting time making decisions, it is recommended to create a criteria for every major decision. For example, board members told a new VIZOR customer that their previous IT Asset Management (ITAM) solution was ill-equipped to meet their security requirements. As a result, the IT team had to find a new solution in one month and created a list of features they required in a new ITAM solution. They scheduled demonstrations with the vendors that met their criteria and discovered how VIZOR did even more than they could have imagined. The criteria helped them make timely decisions . By creating a criteria as a team, it also ensures that all parties are happy with the result.

3. Stick To The Project Objectives

Variables, such as stakeholders, personnel, importance, and funding is likely to change during a project. Identifying these changes is crucial as it will not only impact your decisions regarding your project, but will also affect its success. Nevertheless, there is one part of the project that should not change- the objective. If the goals of a project are constantly changing, that may indicate that multiple projects are required.

An employee at VIZOR worked in a similar situation amidst his 25 years of experience in the IT field. His department was responsible for setting up a call center for customer complaints and requests which is a great project for managing customer satisfaction. However, the project changed into a system that was set out to improve all customer touch points. The objectives of the project were constantly changing and none of them were in fruition.

In the end, stick to your objective or consider multiple projects.

4. Review External Contracts

In many instances, external vendors are a part of projects which can impact budget, time frame and the implementation plan. For example, your organization is in the middle of migrating desktops to Windows 10. Before this can be done, the number of licenses required must be cross checked with the number of Windows licenses you already have. In some cases, you may need to purchase more. You may also want to verify if your contract has upgrading rights. Some contracts may not permit the upgrading of all licenses. These issues must be dealt with before implementation, as it may increase your budgetary requirements, and can cause delays if not dealt with properly.

5. Remember The Stakeholders

When deadlines are fast approaching, remembering the stakeholders can be often overlooked. For example, the end-users may not taken into account when creating a Knowledge Base. A Knowledge Base is a portal of information for employees to help themselves figure out common issues like how to change your password or how to submit a ticket. However, without considering all the stakeholders in the process, the Knowledge Bases risks being useless if not answering to questions the end-users need help with. Regardless of the project, consider all stakeholders throughout a project.

6. Accepting Setbacks

At this point in a project, it can be difficult to overcome setbacks but do not get held up with any delays! It is important to get everything else done to reach your project deadline. If it does not break a process within the project, make sure you are not using it as an excuse to not move forward. The key is to accept the delay while making sure everything you have control over is on track.  F

or example, you are responsible to set up security cameras but find out that the ones you need will only be delivered in 3 weeks rather than the anticipated 3 days. Instead of focusing on the setback, you can work on other aspects of the project, like setting up the wiring. Completing other tasks in the meantime will help you reach your project deadline.  Although it is difficult to accept and overcome delays in a project, you must focus on the overall objective and concentrate on other tasks that need to be done.

Get the checklist of these actions here
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