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What we can learn from Winston Churchill to improve the effectiveness of managing the programme?
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“Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning.” – Winston Churchill. What we can learn from this statesman to help improve the programme management of a project?

As we know the planning process is a large part of managing the project effectively. Due to the demanding nature of project programmes, it’s essential that it is managed and controlled suitably to ensure you meet timescales and manage the customers expectations. Below are methods that need to be adopted in order to achieve this:

1. Improving the Project Estimation Process.
Many factors influence the final outcome of a project, with upfront planning and estimation being two of the most crucial factors to long term project success. Yet many businesses fail to plan ahead and place little importance on the benefits it provides to the business, the individuals and ultimately the client. Project Estimation provides a consistent method of estimating your project resources and expenditure throughout the proposed lifecycle of a project.

2. Gain a better understanding of your true resource capability.
By truly understanding the capability of your available resource, it enables your business to analyse the impact of delivering projects and services on resource capability in real time. This enables you to better manage customer expectations, improve productivity and reduce costs.

3. Plan projects in a clear and consistent manner.
To guarantee the successful delivery of any project, consistency of approach before the project commences is essential. This needs a simple methodology to help your business effectively plan tasks, activities, roles and responsibilities and deliverables required by each project. Thorough planning helps to avoid major mistakes and reduces project risk.

4. Optimise your resource usage.
Resource scheduling provides an essential component for establishing the feasibility of your project plans and for setting realistic customer expectations. By planning this, it means that managers will be able to assess the work flexibility they have over the use of specific resources, align tasks and work activities with resource availability. When resources are limited, there are other options to consider that have the level of skill and experience required to fulfil resource requests.

5. Encourage and facilitate team collaboration.
Project Collaboration provides your business with the ideal platform to encourage your project team members to work in synergy and share knowledge throughout the project management process with each individual contributing towards a common goal. Your business will benefit from greater innovation, better problem solving, greater efficiency in project delivery and reduction in cost and impact of absent resources.

6. Minimise project risk and reduce project failures.
By centrally managing risks, your business has a real time visibility into the status of risks at every stage in the project management process and then a series of mitigating actions can be implemented to manage out risk and limit its impact on the quality and final delivery of your projects.

Give us your thoughts on the key factors that affect the programme and what the best methods are to overcome these.