How to Successfully Complete a Project

There should be three key phases whenever you’re working on a project.

The first one is planning: you’re trying to get clear on what you’re building.

You have to ask yourself, “what’s the goal of this project?”

I find that many people fall behind on their projects primarily because they’re not clear on what they’re trying to accomplish. They’ll say, “I need more templates within my business…”, or, “I need to standardize things across my business,” etc.

The issue here is that they’re not being specific or precise on what they’d like to accomplish.

If you want to create templates, a specific and clear version of that would be an email automation sequence. And after you have that, what purpose will it serve within your business – email marketing? A sales funnel? Customer service? And if you’re standardizing, what exactly do you want to standardize? If it’s the whole of your business, then break that down into components, piece by piece.

In sum, be very, very clear on what you’re trying to accomplish within the planning phase. If you’re not clear, I can guarantee the project will go off the rails at some point because the project will start to shift towards one direction or the other. The scope will inevitably get wider than you intended and fall off.

Then, consider this: what resources do you have? This is something else that can end up derailing your project because at times you’ll unnecessarily scramble to do everything yourself as a result of an unresponsive or unproductive team.

Additionally, what’s the timeline for your project? This is another common issue that people make when planning projects – which, by nature, are time-bound. They have to be completed within a finite amount of time. Without a timeline, I can guarantee that the project will ultimately either go on forever or end poorly/unsuccessfully. And if it goes on forever, it transforms from a simple project to a concrete, on-going part of your business operations, which is not what you’re after.

Hold yourself accountable: When will it be done? What’s the launch date? You need to know when each step should be done, which will, in turn, help you hold yourself and your team members accountable and push the whole thing forward.

Next, what potential challenges could you face along the way? This is another thing you need to look at during the planning phase so that you’re as prepared as possible, with slack built into your timeline to allow for problem-solving along the way.

In essence, if you do a lot of the heavy lifting during the planning phase, the following phases – execution and monitoring – become easy, right?