Trust - Be Open and Honest
Be as open and honest with your team mates as you can. Answer their questions directly and act as a conduit of information for them, not a barrier. If you feel you cannot divulge something, say so. Your team will appreciate your honestly and reciprocate by relaying information and producing honest and accurate estimates for you.

Equality - Be fair and even handed
If there is a project issue that needs to be addressed you can normally broach it as a subject for the whole team to address. By sharing the burden for issues, most teams pull together to solve the problem. By landing it on the shoulders of one or more individuals you often split the team and cause conflict. Open discussion of the problem will encourage the team to take ownership for the problem and solve it themselves.
Loyalty - Protect your team
You will have a split responsibility - on the one hand you have a duty to your client to see the project succeeds - on the other you have a responsibility to represent your team and to support each other. Usually these two aims should be neatly aligned but not always! In a situation where you have to choose between the two you need to take the difficult moral stance. Discuss the situation with your team mates and come up with a solution, present this to the client instead.

Learn to delegate
If you are dividing up work make sure you delegate properly. Proper delegation entails laying out the task so someone understand its, so that it has reasonable and achievable goals and so that you give them all the support they require to get the job done. It also entails giving them enough room to get the task done on their own. If you leave the execution of tasks to them they will, in return, leave you alone to get on with your job. If you spend you time looking over their shoulders it will only annoy them and waste your valuable time.

Some tips for successful project handling:

Know your goal
It may sound obvious, but if you dont have an end-point in mind youll never get there. You should be able to clearly state the goal of your project in a single sentence. If you can’t, your chance of achieving it is slim.

Know your team
Your team is the most important resource you have available and their enthusiastic contribution will make or break your project. Look after them and make sure the team operates as a unit and not as a collection of individuals. Communications are vital! Invest time in promoting trust and ensuring that everyone knows what they have to contribute to the bigger picture. Dish out reward as well as criticism, provide superior working conditions and lead by example.

Know your stakeholders
Spend time with your stakeholders. Stakeholders either contribute expert knowledge offer their political or commercial endorsement which will be essential to success. Shake hands and kiss babies as necessary and grease the wheels of the bureaucratic machine so that your project has the smoothest ride possible.

Spend time on planning and design
A traditional mistake is to leap before you are ready. When youre under pressure to deliver, the temptation is to get the ball rolling. The ball is big and heavy and it’s very, very difficult to change its direction once it gets moving. So spend some time deciding exactly how youre going to solve your problem in the most efficient and elegant way.

Promise low and deliver high
Try and deliver happy surprises and not unpleasant ones. By promising low (understating your goals) and delivering high (delivering more than your promised) you :

• Build confidence in yourself, the project and the team
• Buy yourself contingency in the event that something goes wrong
• Generate a positive and receptive atmosphere

Consider : if everything goes right you will finish early everyone will be happy; if something goes wrong you might still finish on time ; if things goes really badly you might still not deliver what you anticipated but it will still be better than if you over-promised!

Iterate! Increment! Evolve!
Most problems worth solving are too big to swallow in one lump. Any serious project will require some kind of decomposition of the problem in order to solve it. You must pay close attention to how each piece fits the overall solution. Without a systematic approach you end up with a hundred different solutions instead of one big one.
Stay on track
You have an end goal in mind. You need to work methodically towards the goal and provide leadership (make decisions). This applies whether youre a senior project manager with a team of 20 or youre a lone web developer. Learn to use tools like schedules and budgets to stay on track. Consistency is what separates professionals from amateurs.

Manage change
We live in a changing world. As your project progresses the temptation to deviate from the plan will become irresistible. Stakeholders will come up with new and interesting ideas, your team will bolt down all kinds of rat holes and your original goal will have all the permanence of a snowflake in quicksand. Scope creep or drift is a major source of project failure and you need to manage or control changes if you want to succeed.
This doesnt imply that there should be single, immutable plan which is written down and all other ideas must be stifled. You need to build a flexible approach that absorbs changes as they arise. Its a happy medium youre striving for - if you are too flexible your project will meander like a horse without a rider and if you are too rigid your project will shatter like a pane of glass the first time a stakeholder tosses you a new requirement.

Test Early, Test Often
Projects involve creative disciplines burdened with assumptions and mistakes. Sure you can do a lot of valuable work to prevent mistakes being introduced, but to err is human and some of errors will make it into your finished product. Testing is the best way to find and eliminate errors.

Keep an open mind!

• Be flexible! The desired outcome is the delivery of the finished project to a customer who is satisfied with the result. Any means necessary can be used to achieve this and every rule listed above can be broken in the right circumstances, for the right reasons.
• Dont get locked into an ideology if the circumstances dictate otherwise.
• Dont get blinded by methodology.
• Follow your head.
• Focus on delivering the project and use all the tools and people available to you. Keep an eye on the schedule and adjust your expectations and your plan to suit the conditions. Deliver the finished product, promote its use, celebrate your success and then move on to the next project.

 Software Development Plan: This plan maps a course for the project. Committing the plan to writing allows the project’s stakeholders to refer to the plan throughout the project.

Project estimates: Project estimates provide a foundation for project plans. A careful estimate leads to scoping the project appropriately, which in turn leads to budgeting, staffing, and scheduling the project appropriately. A shoddy estimate can undercut the project in all these respects, making it difficult to complete the project successfully and impossible to complete it efficiently.

Revised estimates: Revised estimates created at the end of each major phase of the project allow for mid-course corrections and help to keep the project on solid footing.

A Quality Assurance Plan: A Quality Assurance Plan that includes both technical reviews and testing assures that the project will not succumb to a costly and defect-ridden test, debug, and correction cycle.
A Staged Delivery Plan: A Staged Delivery Plan defines the order in which the software will be constructed. It ensures that the software solution is developed to both maximize the value to the customer at each stage and minimize the risks to the project. In addition to the explicit planning activities I just listed, several of a software project’s other major activities are also planning activities, though they aren’t usually thought of that way.

Requirements development: Requirements development identifies in detail the problem that the project team is trying to solve. It amounts to planning to solve the right problem.

Architecture: Architecture is a high-level specification for the way in which the problem will be solved. It is a plan to build the right solution to the problem.

Detailed design: Detailed design is a comprehensive plan of what the project is going to build. It is a plan to build the right solution in the right way.

The purpose of a project plan is to maintain control of a project.
As a complicated process, a project always threatens to exceed the limit of your control. Some people are better than others at controlling complex problems, but all of us reach our limits at some stage. To maintain control you need help in the form of tools and your best tool is your plan. The project plan controls the project by:

• Breaking a complex process down into a number of simpler components
• Providing visibility for obscure or ambiguous tasks in the project
• Providing a single point of reference for everyone
• Enforcing scrutiny of the sequence and nature of events
• Providing a baseline against which execution of the project can be compared
• Anticipating likely events and providing pre-planned means of avoiding them

A project plan must be as accurate, complete and as specific as possible. How accurate, complete and specific of course depends upon how much time and resources you have.