While some people think that being a project manager is just a doddle, in fact, you need to have broad shoulders to take full responsibility for a project.

Project managers do lots of important tasks, but in general, they need to keep the balance between stakeholders, the project team, objectives, budget, scope creep, and many other tricky words that are following every project, especially digital ones.

If you’re reading this article, you probably know about project management tools and some beginner information on this topic. But in fact, project management is a deep blue sea, and the more you learn, the more questions you have.

However, you don’t need to worry at all. Some project management challenges won’t hurt you if you know at least how to build a structured project workflow. To do that, you better follow the best PM practices and principles. Lucky for you, we prepared a whole list of them for the 2025 year!

What is a Project Management and Its Practices: Complete Definition

First, let's briefly refresh our memory about the definition of what project management is. According to PMI, project management is a toolkit of skills, techniques, knowledge, and finally practices aimed at making projects successful and delivering a meaningful output to people. For example, help projects stay on budget, prevent overgrowing the project scope, and, of course, achieve the expected results.

To put it simply, project management is the process of driving a project successfully through its whole lifecycle and building a balance between all aspects of the project. Indeed, it’s quite difficult to explain project management in a few sentences.It consists of many elements, and one of them is management practices.

Practices are just some actions that are performed regularly to achieve certain results. If you want to ask how managers define what practices are the best, the answer is pretty simple yet not so obvious. Performing some actions from time to time, we notice that some of them lead us to better results. The same is with project management: when you see that some actions are giving the best results, you’ll be doing them all the time for each project. And that’s simply how PM best practices were born.

Although project management is not as strict as, for example, web development, it still has its own principles and recommendations to follow.

Project Management Principles and Recommendations

Some managers and experts claim that principles are fundamental and must be followed in any project. On the other hand, some managers think that principles are more like recommendations, and it’s up to you to decide if you should follow them.

Anyway, we can’t bypass some core project management principles that need to be considered before learning the best practices.

Since PM principles are not formalized, we relied on the information from PMBOK (even though it doesn't have an official list of principles) and annual surveys from resources like PMI and various other project management statistics.

Currently, most project managers follow nine principles:

• Formalized structure
• Regular communication with stakeholders and investors
• Clear and predefined goals
• Strict team roles
• Structured and formal documentation
• Predefined risk management process
• Change management
• Strong understanding of an outcome value
• Performance reports
• Step-by-step approval procedure

But, as a matter of fact, principles complement practices. What does that mean, you may wonder? Practices are actions, while principles are ideas. If principles are “how it has to be”, practices are “how to achieve it”. Therefore, they go hand in hand, and you can’t deal with them separately.

And now it’s finally time to take a closer look at the best project management practices, so let’s delve into the topic!

The List of 13 Best Project Management Practices

Project management tips, ideas, methodologies, and many other complicated things can slip your mind. Principles are more simple, so it’s easier to make them stay in your mind and then successfully implement them.

Principles wrap complex things up, so if you don’t want to waste time implementing whole methodologies to your project management process, here is the list of the 12 best project management principles to support your initiatives:

Run a Proper Initiation

Before the project even starts, you need to run an initiation. Basically, you need to assure high-level management that your project will deliver good value to both the business and the end client. Initiation helps you and stakeholders understand if it matters before going into the planning phase. How to run a proper initiation so your project is approved? It’s pretty simple:

• Create a business case that will be solved by your project’s output.
• Understand who your key stakeholders are and start pitching.
• Conduct a feasibility research.
• Know who you want to see on the project team.

Keeping everyone on the same page and having a clear understanding of why your project will succeed is the first best practice.

Ask For Stakeholders’ Feedback

Not only your opinion matters, but also your business goals. To launch a successful project, the expected results should be client-centric. If you adhere to the client-centric approach, asking for feedback from stakeholders is a really good practice. This way, you can get a clear understanding of what you should deliver at the end of a cycle.

Stakeholders’ feedback can solve many problems before they even appear: you can understand what issue your product should solve, which competitors your stakeholders value the most, among many other things that you find out when the project is finished and you have the end product.

Define Milestones and Project Phases

You won’t achieve any goal if you don’t have a formal plan for a project. Before starting a project, break it down into small steps that need to be taken to achieve the final result. Such small goals or certain points on a timeline are called milestones.

Experienced managers know the worth of milestones. They’re not only helping to create a workflow breakdown structure but also helpful in communication with stakeholders and making up reports. Simply put, with milestones, you can split a project into smaller phases. Once you reach the phase, you complete a milestone.