Your step-by-step guide to great project management
Get more projects across the finish line (with less stress)
What is project management? Project management is the coordination of your processes, tools, team members, and skills so you can deliver projects that exceed your goals.
You and your team are getting ready to conquer a major project. It’s like a long stack of dominoes — it’s so cool when it works, but a big ol’ disappointment if a single piece is even slightly out of place.
These types of projects can be both daunting and exciting, and you might be tempted to start as soon as possible. Do you cross your fingers that everything magically falls into place? Rub a lamp and hope a wish-granting genie arrives to lend a helping hand?
Those would be nice (and let us know if you find a way to make them work!). But, in reality, the secret to success for your big, hairy projects is effective project management.

Project management roles and responsibilities
Potential project roles include:
- Project manager: Person who oversees the entire project and is responsible for the project’s success.
- Project sponsor: Senior manager who champions the project and works closely with the project manager.
- Team member: People who actively work on the project tasks.
- Supplier: People who provide goods or services for a project.
- Stakeholder: People who have an interest in the project. These can be broken into:
- Primary stakeholders: People who actually do the work and are actively involved in the project.
- Secondary stakeholders: People who might come to meetings and play a small part but aren’t key decision-makers in the project.
- Interested stakeholders: People who are in the loop on the project but don’t play an active part or have a lot of influence.
- Client: Person who receives the final project, if it’s a client-facing project rather than an internal one.
How project management software can help
As always, technology is on your side. A survey showed 77% of high-performing projects use project management software. But, despite that impressive statistic, adoption of this type of software remains low (with only 22% of organizations using it).
How does project management software help? It hones the process by:
- Allowing for greater visibility: By knocking down silos, team members can get a bird’s-eye view of the entire project, who’s working on what, when pieces are due, and more.
- Streamlining communication: Don’t waste time searching for what you need. Project management software centralizes all project communication and resources in one place.
- Reducing errors and inefficiencies: Having a single source of truth means less miscommunications and errors on your project team.
- Producing real-time updates: By having this easy-to-reference software, everybody always has the most up-to-date information about the project and progress.
Awesome projects come from awesome plans
You don’t need to hold out for a magic genie. Effective project management is your not-so-secret sauce. With careful planning, strategy, and monitoring, you can set your team up for great project success.
Make sure your team has everything they need to complete winning projects—including the right tools. Jira makes it easy to plan, track, and manage your projects, while Confluence boosts transparency and centralizes your project-related conversations and resources.