In the realm of project management, project success often hinges on structure. Did you plan properly? Were your baselines realistic? Though the details may vary, pretty much all projects can be broken down into project management components — the building blocks that make up a project over its lifecycle. You can’t have a successful project without them.

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In this comprehensive guide, we’ll delve into the top 10 most essential project management components, exploring their purpose, key activities and best practices. Whether you’re a seasoned project manager or new to the field, this article will equip you with the knowledge to navigate your next project with success.

Article Roadmap

• 10 Project Management Components
• What Is Project Management?
• Next Steps

10 Project Management Components

Business projects are complex, and a lot can go wrong with them. In fact, many business projects fail, with the Project Management Institute citing an average failure rate of 28% in their most recent report.

Many factors contribute to project failure, but one of the chief reasons projects fail is simply lack of structure and direction. This is why project management components are so useful — they not only define your work clearly from the outset, but they also shape it along the way, right up until the moment your deliverables are delivered.

Here are the 10 key project management components every project manager needs to know.

1. Scope

A project’s scope defines the work that needs to be accomplished to achieve the objectives and deliver your intended results. The scope outlines what’s within the project’s boundaries and, just as importantly, what’s excluded. This might include things like your tasks and deliverables, as well as any limitations.

Establishing your project’s scope not only makes your approach much more concrete, but also makes it easier to determine if all parties involved — like project managers, team personnel and key stakeholders — understand and agree on your project’s objectives, goals and requirements. Clearly defined boundaries also help you avoid scope creep, which can get unmanageable fast.

As an ongoing concern, scope management involves ensuring that project activities stay within the defined scope, and that any changes or additions to the project scope are properly evaluated, approved and managed.

2. Goals

You wouldn’t go on a treasure hunt if you weren’t looking for treasure, right? In a similar way, you can’t have a successful project without well-defined goals and objectives. Your team’s efforts should always be geared towards something, even at the most granular level. The more well-defined your goals are, the more successful you’re likely to be.

Make sure your project goals are SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound.

3. Budget

The budget is the amount of money allocated for the project. It usually includes costs related to completing specific tasks, like sourcing materials, paying employees and contracting vendors.

Staying within your budget is crucial to project success. Underspending might be okay, but going over budget can take away funds from resources you need, which might cause problems down the line.

Project management software can make tracking your finances over the course of a project much easier. Wrike, for example, comes with a built-in budgeting feature that helps you estimate and monitor your financial data in real time, for both individual projects as well as across all active projects.

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4. Timeline

Every project has a timeline, usually dictated by the stakeholders — they expect to get their deliverables within a certain window, or by a specific date. But to meet that ultimate deadline on time, you’ll need to establish a clear project timeline for all the steps along the way.

In addition to an overall timeline, you’ll want to schedule completion dates for individual tasks or smaller milestones. These deadlines not only keep your team on track, but also serve as progress markers over the course of the project.

Project management software provides several features to help you and your team stay on track. For example, ClickUp’s monitoring tools give you real-time, comprehensive insight into workloads at both the team and individual levels, as well as how each project dependency is progressing.

5. Work Breakdown Structure

A work breakdown structure (WBS) breaks the project down into smaller tasks and subtasks. It essentially provides you and your team with all of the necessary steps that go into each project stage or deliverable — and, if you’re extremely detailed, all of the components that make up each particular task.

Having this structure clarifies exactly what needs to be done and in what order. It also makes it easier to distribute tasks to personnel, which we’ll get into next.

6. Human Resources Plan (HRP)

A complement to the WBS, the human resources plan (HRP) essentially establishes who is working on what. It may also define things like team member availability, how much time they’re expected to contribute to the project or a specific task, and areas of expertise.

In addition to utilizing your established team during the project, the human resources plan can also help shape your staffing strategy. Make sure your HRP covers:

• Personnel requirements: Identify and clearly define the roles you need to fill on your project team, including the tasks each role will take.
• Staff acquisition: If necessary, develop your plan for gathering staff, either in-house or through external hiring.
• Training: If necessary, outline any training or development activities relevant to the roles.
• Management strategy: This is your bird’s eye view of the project team. Your management strategy should consider how you’ll continuously assess team performance and keep morale high during the project. You’ll also want to consider contingency plans if unexpected needs arise, like if you need to change a team member’s assignment or rehire for a role.

7. Communications

Communication is one of the most crucial aspects of project management — in fact, it’s about 90% of a project manager’s job, according to the Project Management Institute. Keeping healthy lines of communication with and among your team members and stakeholders is a non-negotiable component of project success.

Your communication plan should establish both how you and your personnel will communicate, as well as how often and even what you expect to cover. Regular communication keeps your team members accountable and your stakeholders up to date.

To support teamwork and communication, collaboration tools are built into many project management solutions. For example, monday.com lets users tag each other on tasks, hold individual and group conversations, work on files together in real time and maintain a centralized database, all of which foster a collaborative work environment.

Visualizations like burndown charts make it easy for everyone on the team to see the project’s progress, keeping them motivated.

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8. Risk Management

Even with all the emphasis on planning, projects rarely go exactly as planned. Even the most airtight, comprehensive plan isn’t completely infallible. Risk management involves identifying, discussing and strategizing for potential issues that could come up during your work.

Going into your project with a consensus and a protocol for how to handle obstacles means they’ll take less valuable time to overcome if they do come up. It also helps your team adapt to change and stay focused on their work.

9. Key Achievements

Key achievements are your end goals. These go hand in hand with your deliverables, or the concrete products of your project’s completion.

With all our discussion of goals, objectives, milestones and the like, it may be difficult to differentiate your goals from your achievements, and so on.

Essentially, goals can apply to any stage of the project. You’ll naturally have end goals to work towards, but your team may also benefit from daily, weekly or even monthly goals, depending on the length of your project.

It’s similar for milestones and objectives — the former mark your progress, while the latter establish what you’re trying to achieve, and both can apply to as granular an area as daily team tasks.

For example, your project’s end goal might be to create a new online training app for your employees. Your main key achievement is creating the app, or finalizing the design of the app so it can be handed off to developers. Your deliverables might include the app itself, or a document that details the complete design requirements. Milestones along the way might be things like building the app and testing user capabilities.

Ultimately, key achievements are high-level, common goals that guide your team’s efforts, as well as each team member’s individual work. Reaching your key achievements often means producing your deliverables, signaling the successful end of the project.

10. Quality Standards

It might seem like it goes without saying, but quality standards are monumentally important to project success. Not just for the obvious reason, that the work needs to be good, either.

Establishing quality standards ensures that project deliverables meet the defined requirements and expectations of your stakeholders. If anything makes or breaks your success, it’s the quality of your deliverables — they’re kind of the whole point. When your deliverables are off the mark, your project is essentially a bust.

And quality standards aren’t just for keeping stakeholders happy. They also help you make sure your work is above board. In addition to covering your own definition of quality work, your standards should encompass any industry-specific regulations that might be relevant.

In general, clearly defining what “quality work” looks like helps your team work more efficiently, saving valuable time and resources. If they know exactly what’s considered quality and what isn’t, they’re more likely to do the job right the first time.

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What Is Project Management?

Now that we’ve talked about its most essential components, what actually is project management? Project management is the application of specialized knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to accomplish a goal and create something of value.

Strategies in project management balance meeting specific project objectives within set constraints, including some of our components, like time, budget and scope. And it can’t be stressed enough: successful projects involve careful planning, management and execution from start to finish.

Next Steps

Project management components can help you develop a strategic, structured approach to managing projects, ensuring their successful completion. Taking each component into account at the outset and monitoring them over the course of your work will help you navigate the project lifecycle with confidence.

Remember, project management isn’t one-size-fits-all, and adapting to the specific needs of each project is crucial. If you need more help managing your projects, you might want to consider adopting project management software for your business. Check out our free comparison report to see how industry-leading products in PM stack up.

So, how do you manage your projects? Do you think focusing on project management components can make a difference for your business? Let us know in the comments!