Project delivery: Your down-to-earth guide

5 steps to successful project delivery

When you broaden your understanding of the term “project delivery” to take in all the phases of your work, every step becomes vital to your project’s success. 

You and your team might naturally follow certain steps as you complete your projects. However, common challenges like scope creep, unclear objectives, and poor resource management can easily derail your work and impact the results.  

When you establish a project delivery roadmap with defined, chronological steps, it’s easier to deliver successful projects every time. 

Let’s start by looking at the stages of a project delivery plan, and how each one can build toward a successful outcome. 

Step 1: Initiation

Project initiation is the crucial first phase of the project lifecycle, where the project is defined, analyzed, and approved. 

The first days of any project test its value and feasibility. Are you the team to take it on, and is it worth the time and resources you’d have to invest? 

This means many of the jobs during the initiation phase are analytical. You’ll look at feasibility studies, financial analyses, and results from other comparable projects. You’ll also compare and set up the tools you’ll need to deliver the project and factor those into your budget.  

At this stage of the project, most of the work falls to the project manager or management team.

Having said this, if managers want the team to fully engage with the project (and for the work to run smoothly), it’s a good idea to ask for input from other key stakeholders as these early decisions are made. Team members might have valuable insights from past projects that can save you some headaches once the work begins. 

Note: In large organizations, it’s common for projects to have a delivery manager as well as a project manager. These people should work closely together, but they have very different responsibilities. The project manager takes care of the vision (the “what” of the project), while the delivery manager finds ways to bring the vision to life (the “how”). 

Why is the initiation phase crucial to project delivery? 

Even during the initiation phase, the decisions you make directly impact the final success of the project. Essentially, you’re laying the foundation. This phase sets expectations, ensures the project’s value, and starts to build accountability into the project plan. 

Most importantly, a solid initiation phase irons out problems and misunderstandings that would otherwise snowball when the project work begins. Solving these issues at the beginning makes it more likely you’ll deliver your project on time, on budget, and to brief. 

Check out Wrike’s project delivery initiation template to help you cover your bases and collect all the information you need to kick off a successful project. 

Step 2: Planning

Project planning translates your project goals into a roadmap and shares the information with the wider team. 

During the planning phase, your management team should write down and share: 

• Project plans, including detailed documents on the scope, the deliverables, and the way resources will be allocated at each remaining stage
• Project goals and objectives, along with a list of the KPIs they’ll use to measure success
• Draft workflows to show their vision for how the project will unfold, how they’ll standardize repeatable processes, and how they’ll check the work is compliant
• Risk management strategies and potential contingency plans to keep the team on track and deliver the project even if circumstances change during the next phase 

The management team will still create the documents you need during this phase. But, at the end of the planning process, the focus shifts from the manager to the wider team. Planning phases are rounded off with a kickoff meeting. 

During this meeting, the project information is shared more widely, there’s an opportunity to ask questions, and the team is set up to begin the work. 

The value of planning for project delivery

If the initiation phase made sure there were no major roadblocks to a successful project, the planning phase is about establishing a strategy to keep it that way. 

Done well, project planning – and your kickoff meeting – will prevent bottlenecks and communication issues from derailing your project once work begins. Plus, when everyone on your team starts working from the same project roadmap, you create a sense of transparency and task ownership that helps everyone deliver their best work.

Read more: What’s the best project plan template? 3 templates to try

Step 3: Execution 

The bulk of the project work is carried out during the execution phase. 

After the kickoff meeting, everyone on your team will know: 

• Who their colleagues are and what they’re responsible for
• What the goals of the project are (and why they matter) 
• How they’re expected to communicate 
• Which tools they’ll use to complete their work

They’ll also leave the meeting knowing the first action items on their plate so they can get straight to work. Having said this, the tasks and roles during the execution phase will be completely unique to your project. 

For example, if you’re launching a new product, your team might have to coordinate marketing, design, product development, and market research in a web of dependent tasks. On the other hand, if your project is an event, you’ll have to coordinate with more specialists from outside your organization to deliver your project successfully. 

You’ll also be up against a hard deadline, which can influence the way you set your priorities and the way your tasks flow.

But whatever project you have to undertake, if you’ve laid the groundwork in the first two phases and built contingencies into your plan, the execution should be smooth sailing. 

Explore Wrike’s project management templates for collaborative work.

Step 4: Controlling and monitoring 

Controlling and monitoring keep your project on track as you start to tick off your tasks. 

Some organizations treat “controlling and monitoring” and “execution” as one project phase because they can happen simultaneously. The team members controlling and monitoring a project get ongoing updates about the project’s progress, and they analyze this data and adjust the plan if necessary. This type of strategic planning can make or break your project delivery objectives. 

This phase of the project is where a delivery manager can come into their own. 

With tasks including performance analysis, resource tracking, and project update meetings, there are plenty of opportunities to identify and remove roadblocks while the project is in motion. It’s also vital to have someone communicating learnings and changes to the team so everyone on the project gets the memo. 

Why controlling and monitoring is essential for project delivery

Controlling and monitoring is a strategic action that grounds your work. Including this phase in your project delivery plan means recognizing that project roadmaps can evolve once the rubber hits the road — and taking steps to protect your project from potential pitfalls. 

When you designate team members or managers to have a whole-project overview, you can be alerted to risks before they impact the project deliverables. This means controlling and monitoring makes it far easier to deliver the project you originally planned — or even exceed expectations. 

Discover Wrike’s powerful project reporting software to give 360-degree visibility across your teams. 

Step 5: Closure 

Project closure is the final, critical step at the end of the project. It delivers the work and wraps up the project with a time of reflection and feedback.

True project closure involves more than handing the deliverables over to the client. For example, your team will also have to: 

• Store the materials used in the project for future reference 
• Take inventory of their resources 
• Discuss what they’ve learned with the rest of the team 
• Communicate the success of the project and thank the team members involved

The importance of the closure phase for project delivery

A well-executed closure phase can help you keep your current clients happy, but the real value lies in the edge it gives your future projects. 

By carefully outlining and completing the tasks at this stage, you gain valuable insights that can improve your delivery process. Recording and reflecting on your experience can help you upgrade your project intake system, make your planning and scheduling more accurate, and create a repeatable, adaptable framework for all your future projects. 

In a nutshell, when you consider every step of the process as a project delivery phase, you can create consistently excellent work while also building a more streamlined, scalable, and sustainable framework for your team. 

Project delivery methodologies 

Although most projects can slot into the five-stage project delivery model we discussed above, there are several schools of thought about the best way to maximize productivity as you move through the steps. 

From Agile approaches that evolve with your project to rigidly sequential Waterfall workflows, knowing the basics of a widely used project delivery framework can help you decide how to split up, schedule, and prioritize your tasks.

Process-based project delivery: Productivity through waste reduction 

Process-based process management strategies are a mainstay of business process management (BPM). 

These methodologies break projects down into a collection of processes. When these processes work efficiently, you can achieve better results with fewer resources, so process-based approaches focus on making project delivery as fast and seamless as possible. 

This means these strategies prioritize removing bugs from your business processes. In fact, the Six Sigma approach defines the quality of a process by the number of bugs it contains. The more bugs you can eliminate, the more highly rated your project delivery. 

You can also see this in action in the Lean project management approach. 

Lean starts by breaking down your work process to identify waste — like time wasted because of a bottleneck at a critical stage in your workflow. 

A common example here would be a delay in a team’s approval workflow. If you find that the assets you’re producing for a client sit in a reviewer’s inbox for days on end, giving approval authority to another team member can halve the turnaround time and make the final stages of project delivery far more organized. 

Organizations that use Lean and other process-based management techniques can expect: 

• Reduced lead times 
• Lower inventory and storage costs, as well as lower overall costs 
• Improved productivity and efficiency 
• A higher standard of work, leading to increased customer satisfaction 

Agile project delivery: Innovation through cyclical problem solving 

The Agile framework is built on four key values: 

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools 
• Working software over comprehensive documentation 
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation 
• Responding to change over following a plan 

This can be a collaborative, dynamic mindset that helps a team deliver innovative work. 

Admittedly, there are certain risks in an Agile approach. For example, the potential for change during a project cycle can lead to scope creep or adjustments to the original brief. However, truly Agile project delivery roadmaps balance these blue-sky values with a cyclical execution framework that keeps the momentum behind your project work. 

The idea of a sprint cycle is central to the Agile approach. 

Here, tasks are added to a backlog and then tackled during a “sprint” of intense work. This method of project delivery is especially suited to developers who might receive tickets with bug reports, requests, and updates (though we’ve also written on developing an Agile strategy for creative and marketing teams).Alongside sprint cycles, two other principles originated with Agile and have since made their way into a wider range of project delivery plans. 

• Kanban methodology is a way of visualizing the tasks in the project cycle, where cards representing jobs to be done move through the team’s shared workflow as they’re completed. 
• Scrums are daily meetings where everyone involved in the project connects, updates each other on their progress, and asks for the resources they need. Traditionally, these are led by a Scrum master, whose job is to clear the obstacles that stand in the team’s way. This ties in closely with the role of the project delivery manager we discussed above. 

Sequential methodologies: A clear roadmap for linear project delivery

Sometimes, simpler projects or smaller teams can get by with a project delivery framework that looks more like a flowchart.

These delivery methods are simple and chronological, but they can be invaluable if your main goal is to stick to the five-step delivery process we discussed above. 

Because these methods state that you can’t move on to the next stage before you’ve completed all the tasks in the previous one, they can keep you on track as you move toward your project handover. 

Common sequential methods include: 

• Waterfall project delivery: This is where every step is preplanned and then tackled in sequence. 
• Critical path project delivery: Identify the dependent tasks in your workflow (the tasks where one job can’t begin until another is complete) and use these connections to determine the path you need to follow in a workflow diagram like a Gantt chart.  
• Critical chain project delivery: Add the necessary resources to your critical path diagram to give a more accurate plan for your work. Critical chain diagrams usually include buffers of time, which can also make it easier to deliver your projects on schedule. 

While these methods aren’t best suited to projects where the brief can change, they can be a great fit when your goal is to produce a physical object like a new product, a building project, or even an event. 

PRINCE2

PRINCE2, which stands for “Projects in Controlled Environments,” is one of the most widely practiced project delivery frameworks in the world. 

This framework focuses on selecting the right projects (those with a defined customer, realistic benefits, a clear need, and an effective cost assessment), completing them to a high standard, and internalizing learnings to improve future projects. Crucially, every project is treated individually, with the method adjusted to suit each client. 

The way PRINCE2 defined roles can revolutionize the way your team approaches project delivery. Every project has a board that includes:

• The customer financing the project
• A representative of the end user
• A supplier who checks if the solution is practical

When you include all these viewpoints in your strategic planning throughout the project, you can deliver something that adds value for everyone involved. 

While there’s no be-all-and-end-all approach to project delivery, it pays to research the different points of view. This can help you choose a roadmap, a management structure, and a method of visualization that makes sense for the work you have to complete. 

Tips for successful project delivery

No matter what methodology appeals to you, there are steps you can take to help guarantee a great outcome for your project. 

Use project management software to power your project delivery

Work management software like Wrike will power every phase of your project in a way that’s custom built for your team. 

Whether you want to improve the way you deliver projects or scale up your business, working within a robust tool like Wrike is the single most impactful change you can make. Wrike’s project management tools give you all the essential elements you need: 

• Project dashboards for a real-time overview that’s tailored to your project 
• Project mapping tools like Gantt charts, Kanban boards, and calendar views to keep your project delivery on track
• Workflow automation tools to boost productivity, standardize your approach to repeatable tasks, and help you complete your work more efficiently 
• Progress and risk management reports to keep you up to speed with the latest developments in your project
• Communication tools like automated notifications and reminders, proofing and review software,  and easy sharing even with outside stakeholders 
• Exhaustive integrations with the other tools your team uses every day — from Google Drive to Salesforce to Adobe Creative Cloud — to centralize your work and streamline project delivery from initiation to closure 

Wrike can maximize your team’s performance, accelerate growth for your business, and improve your customers’ experience — transforming the way you deliver projects.  

Define and communicate your project goals 

Your project goals matter. They show you where you’re headed when you’re in the weeds, and also show your team how their work fits into the bigger picture. That’s why it’s vital to find a way to define and communicate your objectives — and make them real — from the very beginning of your project. 

One way to define your goals more clearly and ensure you deliver a fantastic project is by refining your project intake system. 

For example, in Wrike, you can set up a custom request form to gather this information whenever you get a request for a new project. You’ll establish your goals more clearly, make sure they’re understood by your team, and align with your client’s vision from the outset

Build a work breakdown structure to see all the necessary steps

At the top of this post, we spoke about breaking your project delivery plan into five phases. If you want to give yourself the best chance of success, it’s worth going into each of those phases and breaking the project down into tasks, subtasks, and dependencies that contribute to a successful delivery.

Diagrams like work breakdown structures will help you allocate resources, and they’ll show you when it’s time to move on to the next phase of your project. 

Plus, when you set up these tasks in Wrike, your project progress tracking will be completely transparent, so you have all the data you need to inform your management decisions and deliver a great outcome. 

Consistently evaluate your work

Regular reporting is essential for every stage of project delivery. It keeps you on the straight and narrow, helps you respond to team members who need support, and recognizes that project delivery roadmaps may evolve as your work progresses. 

Ongoing project evaluation doesn’t have to mean an all-hands meeting or hours spent poring over spreadsheets. (Don’t forget — with Wrike, you can instantly generate reports by filtering your project data, and even automate reports to land in your inbox at the end of the working week.)By following these steps, you’ll work more efficiently, stay aligned with your goals, and create a culture of continuous improvement that can take your future projects to an even higher level. 

For confident, fail-safe project delivery, choose Wrike 

Project delivery isn’t just the final handover; it’s all the steps and strategies you use to get there. That’s why improving your team’s project delivery means more than simply creating a list of tasks. 

When you define your goals, your process, and the way you’ll prioritize your tasks and resource allocation, you set yourself up to exceed expectations every time you deliver a completed project. 

The most important factor in successful project delivery is choosing the tools and methods that suit your team’s style. 

Global brands like Siemens Smart Infrastructure, Sony Pictures Television, and Walmart Canada use Wrike to power every stage of their projects. Our tools can be customized to any type of project and any project delivery methodology that makes sense for your work. Plus, the real-time, in-depth project overview you get with Wrike gives you the granular data you need to do your best work. 

Find out how Wrike can build a robust and reliable framework to deliver your latest projects.

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