Many of us have heard about project management, especially as an upcoming career path. But only a few know the actual drill. Project management encompasses several phases: initiation, planning, execution, monitoring, and closure. Every stage is an activity in project management.
Whether you are an experienced project manager looking to upgrade your skills or a curious beginner for insights into the art of successful projects, this fundamental guide will educate you with knowledge and tools to work with project management fundamentals.
What is Activity in Project Management?
When it comes to knowing what project activities are, project activity is typically defined and identified during the project planning phase and is organized in a logical sequence to ensure the smooth flow of work. It is also known as a project task. You can also say that activity in project management is a discrete segment contributing to the entire project's completion.
Each activity or project task comprises smaller subtasks, all logically connected. Completing one array of related activities will lead to the next stage. Eventually, when you have completed every task and subtask in a project, it will be considered the project completion and deliverable ready.
What is the Role of Project Activity?
Planning and management are crucial factors in a project's success. With a high level of management and techniques like the Work Reakdown Structure (WBS), the project can be guided closer to its objectives.
The project planning activities give the project manager granular control over everything by breaking down a high-level aim into a low-level objective. This, further, splits into a series of activities and sub-tasks necessary to fulfill it.
Here are some key roles that project activities play:
Progress Measurement
Project activities offer a quantifiable and observable tool to monitor development throughout the project. Project managers can analyze how well the project is progressing overall and make the required adjustments by keeping track of how each activity is being completed.
Task Coordination
Within a project, activities aid in task coordination. By laying out the order and dependencies of the work, they make sure that each task is completed in the right order and within the allotted time.
Resource Allocation
Resource allocation is probably one of the most challenging tasks, but here's when project activity comes to the rescue. It makes effective resource allocation easy. Project managers can allocate resources, such as team members, tools, and budget, to each activity based on its needs by segmenting the project into different activities.
Time Management
It's one of the most crucial factors for project completion, and project activities facilitate effective time management. Project managers may efficiently manage timelines by developing realistic schedules by calculating the length of each task and determining their interdependencies.
Risk Identification and Mitigation
Another significant role that project activity plays is risk identification and reduction. Analyzing each action allows project managers to spot possible problems or bottlenecks and create backup plans to deal with them.
Performance Evaluation
Project activities give us a way to gauge how well individuals and teams accomplish. Project managers can evaluate team member performance and pinpoint opportunities for development by keeping an eye on the timeliness and caliber of completed tasks.
From the above discussion, it’s apparent that project activities play a crucial role in planning, overseeing, and managing all the tasks and resources a project requires. They aid in the project's execution's success and guarantee that it is in line with the aims and objectives that have been set up.
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How Activities Vary from Milestones?
In project management, activities and milestones are two separate components, each with a specific function:
Activities
Activities are certain tasks or work items that must be finished to accomplish project goals. They have specified beginning and ending places, lengths, and dependencies. An activity in project management is typically depicted in project schedules and Gantt charts and is used to track progress, allocate resources, and manage time. It assists with the project's overall execution and conclusion.
Milestones
Milestones, on the other hand, are significant junctures or occurrences in a project that signify the end of a crucial phase or delivery. They are frequently used as checkpoints to gauge progress and denote significant accomplishments or decision points in the project timeline. In contrast to durations, milestones are frequently portrayed as precise dates or occurrences.
What is a Project Activity List in Project Management?
Identifying all of the project's activities is one of the crucial tasks in project planning. By creating an activity list in project management, you can accomplish that.
A project's activities are listed in a document called an activity list. Each activity should be thoroughly described in it. In this manner, each project team member should be fully aware of the steps necessary to complete each activity.
A project list should contain all necessary details about the project activity. The critical activity in project management consists of the following data:
- The sequence of their completion,
- The start and end dates,
- Their timeline,
- Required resources, etc.
How to Create a Project Activity List?
A project should be divided into smaller tasks or activities before you begin working on it. Controlling the progress and the budget will be a lot simpler this way. PRINCE2 certification online will help you prepare for industry-agnostic project management skills and get educated on the project activity list.
Step 1: Create a Project Plan
Building a project plan is one of the project initiation activities. It's typically vital to prepare a project plan, which is a document that defines all pertinent elements regarding how the project is executed, assessed, controlled, and completed, before attempting to identify and sequence all actions required for your project.
The project's primary objectives and scope are outlined in the project plan, which serves as a guide for the team in the responsibility of finishing the project and its stakeholders.
A project plan is typically a crucial tool for ensuring that everyone involved is aware of the project's objectives, even though it may change throughout the execution phase based on new information.
Step 2: List All Activities Related to the Project
When you have a project plan in place, you can begin making a list of all the tasks that must be accomplished for the project to be successful.
Finding all of the project's primary activities and then breaking each one down into individual tasks and subtasks is typically the most efficient approach to accomplish this.
By making each task measurable, you can ensure that you can evaluate activity success while the project is being carried out. You can typically break down the actions into smaller, possibly measurable tasks if they seem challenging or impossible.
Step 3: Identify the Dependencies Between Each Activity
It is crucial to identify the project's dependencies on one another after all the tasks necessary to complete it have been listed.
For a project to be successfully scheduled, completed, and free of unexpected delays, determining all project dependencies is significant.
A project's activities might be dependent on each other in one of four ways:
- Finish-to-start: An activity must be completed before another can start.
- Start-to-start: An activity must commence so that another can also start.
- Finish-to-finish: An activity must be completed before another one may be completed.
- Start-to-finish: One activity must start before another can also be completed.
Step 4: Align All Activities
You may arrange all tasks and activities in a logical and effective sequence now that you are aware of how they relate to one another.
You do not yet need to provide exact deadlines and due dates for the activities on your list; you simply need to decide on their order.
You can design a task flow that is more effective by concentrating on the sequence before deciding how much time should be allotted for each.
Step 5: Assess Activity Durations and Required Resources
Finding previous projects with similar responsibilities is one of the best ways to determine how long each activity would take. If no pertinent information is available, you can estimate something by averaging the best, worst, and most likely scenarios.
No matter how well you forecast a task's completion time, keep in mind that it also depends on how you distribute project resources.
For instance, if an employee must complete several jobs, they can often only complete one at a time. This can impact the project's schedule.
Step 6: Create an Activity List
You can make an activity list after outlining the project strategy and establishing a general understanding of all the significant tasks necessary for its fulfillment.
A typical activity list contains information about the project, such as its name, project manager, start date, and stakeholders, as well as a list of all the activities, along with the people to whom they are allocated and additional notes for each. The list of tasks can optionally be given a number to help you remember their order.
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Examples of Project Activity List
Before discovering project activities list examples, let us have a look at the template for the project activity list. In the template, the introductory section of the activity list comprises information related to the project, such as:
- The project name
- The project number
- Project manager
- Start date
- Estimated completion date
- Client name
After the introductory segment comes the main body- the description of each activity. This section includes information such as:
- Activity number
- Activity name
- Activity description
- Assigned to
- Additional comments
Let us take another template, for example:
The introductory part in the above template of the activity list contains- the project number, date, full project name, and the project manager.
The next part, i.e., the body of the activity list, also known as the description, contains information related to the project, such as activity ID, activity title, activity description, and the scope of work.
Conclusion
An activity in project management is the foundation of any project. To produce the intended results, you must first ensure you have all the necessary information and resources. Spend time and energy defining tasks in detail so that they can later serve as a template for new projects.
Due to their shared goal of achieving the same project objective, project activities are interconnected and dependent upon one another. They have start and end dates, which make them significantly vital in tracking the project’s progress. However, they are only as effective as the person managing them—the project manager.
A project manager makes an activity list to get a comprehensive perspective of all the project's activities. This is a document that lists every step of a specific project.
An organized project activity list demonstrates your complete control over the undertaking and your understanding of the goals. It also enables you to assess the success of your project and track its progress.
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