-
When Reality Hits - Project Managers Roll With It
February 11, 2012
-
When IT Is Your Company’s “Piggy Bank”
February 10, 2012
-
4 Key Things a Project Manager Must Do
February 10, 2012
-
Essential Project Management
February 10, 2012
-
8 Traits of Top Project Managers - Part 1
February 9, 2012
-
Agile Project Management - Engaging Your Customer!
February 9, 2012
-
9 Tips to Avoid Traps in Project Planning
February 9, 2012
-
Why Projects Succeed - Executive Sponsorship
February 8, 2012
-
On Customer Participation in Agile Projects
February 8, 2012
-
A Project Charter for Lazy Teams
February 8, 2012
10 Questions that Determine a Project’s Success
January 28, 2010 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Project Management Best Practices
10 Questions that Determine a Project’s Success
By Paul Stacey
Establishing a firm foundation for a project is critical to its success. If you don’t, then it’s a bit like building a house without bothering to lay proper footings. Things might look OK for a while (although if you look closely you can probably see the cracks already appearing). Inevitably though, the whole edifice will come tumbling down, bringing pain, distress and abject misery to all involved.
Our experience shows us that managers don’t lay adequate foundations for their project assignments. Instead they work on assumptions or what they intuitively feel to be the case. This is a very risky thing to do! Studies show that problems in establishing the assignment properly at the outset are a major cause of projects going off the rails.
So when you begin your next project make sure you have the answers to these ten questions. They will ensure that your project begins on a sound footing.
- What’s wrong with the current situation? It’s important to define the problem, issue or opportunity that the assignment will address.
-
How will things be different when we’ve finished? What are the benefits that this assignment will bring to the organisation? There has to be a clear business case for the assignment.
-
What are the performance criteria? What does this “thing” that we will be creating have to do? How well will it need to perform? Here we are defining the business requirements for the deliverable, not the actual deliverable itself.
-
What’s the scope of the assignment? What is in and what is out? This will help to prevent the onset of the dreaded “scope creep” and provides the basis for change control.
-
What are the cost constraints? How much can the organisation commit to the assignment? Note that this is not the same thing as a detailed project budget!
-
What are the time constraints? Again, this is not the same thing as a detailed project schedule. Questions 5 & 6 refer to constraints, not estimates.
-
What project specific constraints exist? These could be people, equipment – whatever will constrain the project team’s ability to deliver the work.
-
Who is the project sponsor? It’s astounding how often this vital role is not clearly defined, resulting in confusion and delay due to slow (or no) decision making. Essentially the sponsor is the person who makes the decisions, on behalf of the organisation, about the assignment. They also hold the purse strings!
-
Who is the project manager? The person responsible for making it happen.
-
What authority is being delegated? Project managers need to know the limits of their authority, so that if one of those limits is reached it triggers a conversation with their sponsor. It’s important for project managers (especially for their sanity) that they have sufficient authority to make the day-by-day decisions necessary to deliver the work.
Of course, laying a firm foundation is only the first step to creating the project deliverable and many potential pitfalls remain for the unwary project manager. But without clear answers to these ten questions it is highly likely that the project will encounter significant problems later.
Paul Stacey is an experienced facilitator, coach and consultant who has worked throughout Europe, Africa, Asia and North America in a wide variety of business sectors, including financial services, pharmaceuticals, computer software, manufacturing, food production, brewing and hotels. He is currently an associate at Priority Management and is the lead facilitator for the Project Management Breakthroughs programme.
feel free to leave a comment
Comment Guidelines: Basic XHTML is allowed (a href, strong, em, code). All line breaks and paragraphs are automatically generated. Off-topic or inappropriate comments will be edited or deleted. Email addresses will never be published. Keep it PG-13 people!
XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
All fields marked with " * " are required.
- Agile Project Management
- Ask the Hut
- Certification
- Change Management
- Communications Management
- Computer Based Information Systems
- Concepts
- Corporate Transformation
- Cost Management
- Critical Chain Project Management
- Delegation
- History
- HR Management
- Implementing Project Management
- Integration Management
- Lessons Learned
- Management
- Miscellaneous
- People Issues
- PMBOK
- PRINCE2
- Procurement Management
- Program Management
- Project Lifecycle Phases
- Project Management Advantages
- Project Management Advantages
- Project Management as a Career
- Project Management Best Practices
- Project Management Charts
- Project Management Definitions
- Project Management Ethics
- Project Management for Beginners
- Project Management Guides
- Project Management Musings
- Project Management Office
- Project Management Proposals
- Project Management Templates
- Project Portfolio Management
- Project Workforce Management
- Quality Management
- Requirements Management
- Risk Management
- Scheduling
- Scope Management
- SCRUM
- Soft Management
- Time Management
- Training
- Uncategorized
4 people have left comments
This is the stuff that belongs in a Project Charter. I’d add at least two more items. 1) What does “Done” look like? What are the two or three CSFs — critical success factors — that will determine whether you’re successful overall? 2) Who are the stakeholders? The sponsor is one, of course, but who else?
Then get the stakeholders to sign — or at least sign off on — the Charter.
The Project Charter should be a formal document (or set of short documents) for formal and/or larger projects. For some projects, especially those not under formal project management (some organizations are averse to formal project management, but the PM tasks need to get done anyway in another guise), the PM should still collect the info in the Charter; in such cases the Charter might be structured as a series of EMails.
— Steven B. Levy
Author, Legal Project Management: Control Costs, Meet Schedules, Manage Risks, and Maintain Sanity
I agree with Steven in that these are questions to be answered before a project begins. A ‘balanced scorecard’ that is focused on the project’s stakeholders determines a project’s ultimate success. Include:
1. Financial perspective (on time, on budget,etc)
2. Business/customer perspective (met requirements, ease of use, etc)
3. Quality perspective (number/severity of post implementation problems, performance, etc)
4. Project team (employee) perspective. (good use of skills, challenging, good teamwork, etc)
I like the “What does done look like” in Steven’s comment. The definition of “done” should be communicated to everyone, from the stakeholders (on a broader scale) to team members (for the simplest of tasks).
Balanced Scorecards are a great idea Ross.
Paul, you hit the nail on the head with the “who is the sponsor” question. Bad communication skills, even if you know who it is, can lead to just as many problems.http://www.steelray.com/blog/?p=8 addresses this in part.