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13 Ways to Guarantee Project Failure - Part I
August 15, 2008 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Miscellaneous, Project Management Musings
13 Ways to Guarantee Project Failure - Part I (#1 in the series 13 Ways to Guarantee Project Failure)
By Ben Menoza
It’s hard to believe that, after a number of years working with project-based teams, the greatest lessons learned are hardly ever remembered from project to project. Most of the mistakes made are avoided simply by treating your project team right, trusting a proven process to run its course, setting and managing expectations accordingly, and learning to admit when you’re wrong. And yet for a myriad of reasons — fear of delivering bad news, ineptitude of the people involved, among them — a project can swiftly become doomed.
That said, if you want the project to fail, I’ve compiled a list of some pointers, guaranteed to ruin any project to some degree. This is, by no means, an exhaustive list. If you have more, please feel free to leave a comment.
#1: Never, under any circumstances, should you share your project plan with the team. Not even your clients.
As manager of the project plan, it is your responsibility to break down all of the tasks from your project, provide estimates for each of those tasks, put them in the most logical order possible, and inform the client of all milestones and their dates. While it’s perfectly acceptable to receive input from your project team, they certainly aren’t qualified to help you out, and some would argue they can’t be trusted. Instead, always trust your gut, heart, or any other non-logical organ, withhold the details of your plan from your team and the client, and only tell them what the important dates are.
#2: Never keep your project team involved in the estimation process.
Your team should be allowed to give their task estimates once and only once, and you should never give them an opportunity to revise those estimates. While some consider this a chance to provide more informed estimates — because the requirements have changed or some other silly reason — you should think of this as hedging or second-guessing. Dismiss these feelings and move forward with what you initially got. The team will thank you for trusting their first instincts.
Ben Menoza is a senior member of the User Experience team at Optaros, an international consulting and systems integration firm that provides enterprises with online business solutions that leverage the next generation of internet technologies and approaches. He has over eight years of experience managing, designing and developing web applications for organizations in the financial, e-commerce, and entertainment industries, among others.
You can reach Ben through his blog.
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