Project management checklist

Starting your new project? Executing new strategy plan? Or just managing the implementation of a new feature? In all those cases you are going to need a project management checklist.

Purpose of the project management checklist

The purpose of the project management checklist is to ensure that the project manager and the team members are aware of every detail regarding the project and every specific micro-task. The project manager should be responsible to create, update and manage the checklist. The checklist should clearly answer the following questions:
- What is the roadmap to finish the project?
- Which task should be done before, after or along with each task?
- Who is responsible to develop and do the task?
- What is the due date and the estimated time for each task?
- What is the ultimate due date to deliver the project completely?

You could use project management software like Microsoft Project to help yourself with breaking the project into tasks. Also, a simple Excel spreadsheet could be used to create your checklist.

Good project management checklist

I am providing an example of a checklist I did for one of the projects I managed. Here are several points to pay attention when creating your checklist:
- Prepare the tasks in the traditional waterfall methodology. The tasks that should be implemented first should go on the top of the other tasks.
- There should be an estimated time for every task.
- There also should be a separate field for the due date of every task. This should be the final due date when the task must be completely finished/delivered.
- There should be a responsible person or team (team leader) to deliver the task. You could also put supporting persons there.
- You could use colors to mark any due dates in danger or any due dates that were not met.
- You could leave a note field for every task. This, in no way should keep you out of filling details about the project in your project/task list note field.
- You need to get into details and break the project on relatively small tasks – that’s the purpose of your checklist.
- You need to manage your checklist and even add new tasks when they appear. Also update the project management checklist every time something happens with a related task.

What should you avoid doing in your project management checklist 

- Avoid overcomplicating your project management checklist. Your checklist is there to help you manage the project, not to be additional bureaucratic burden to you.
- Having a responsible person or a team and also getting proper estimates and due dates is the core data in your checklist. Always ensure that those fields are filled in.
- Avoid using your checklist to store very detailed notes regarding particular task. You should be using project management list to store detailed notes about how a particular project is going. It is easier to read and keep track of the notes there.

Project management - Project list

The project/task list is one of the most useful tools a decent project manager is going to need. 
Imagine you are a project manager for external/internal projects and you have more than 20 projects to manage. If you do not have a decent list of projects you soon will be lost and confused. You are going to forget most of the communication done for every single project and put the projects in risk of failure.

So you definitely need a place to store all of your projects information, due dates, progress, task-numbers, etc. And this is why you need this magic tool… the project list.

What information should you put into the project list?

Well, before you get too excited keep in mind that on top of everything else - the project list should be useful and very easy to browse. Imagine a customer is calling you to discuss something about his project. You really need to be able to quickly get to the proper location and information for this particular project. And you definitely do not want to overdo your project list and make it hard to browse.

To start – you need the project’s name for sure. If it is a web project you also need the web site this project is associated with. It is important to have a place to write notes too. And if you are using tasks management software like Jira you need a place to keep record of all Jira task numbers referring to this project. It is also good to have a row with the current phase of the project, and also the date of the latest action – when something was done for the project.

Example of a good project list

Here is an example of the project list I use (click on the picture to enlarge it).

And these are the fields I use:
- Project name – make it clear enough.
- Web site – web site associated with the project. This could really be software name or something else, depending on the type of the project.
- Phase – the current stage of the project.
- Date of last action – should give you a hint when was the last time something happened on that particular project.
- Due date – put your final due date for the completion of the project there.
- Notes/Comments - the most important field!!! Always put a short memo when something happens to the project. Use the format – date/hour and what happened. This way you could always keep track over the project’s actions and parties involved. You could also very easily create reports using the “notes” field.
- Jira N – contains the task number in Jira. It could be used with other task management software as well.