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13 Ways to Guarantee Project Failure - Part III
August 22, 2008 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Project Management Musings
13 Ways to Guarantee Project Failure - Part III (#3 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.
#5: Once you’ve completed the project plan, it should never change.
Assuming that the tasks have been properly estimated and sequenced, once the project plan has been sent off (you know, if you’re into that sort of thing) or printed, it’s done. There is no going back on your word. Changing the project plan now is simply out of the question, even if requirements change, or if a task is, for some reason, wrongly estimated. Your project plan ceases to be a living document, an artifact worthy of comparison to the Ten Commandments.
#6: Queue up all of your issues so you can deliver them all at once and at the right time.
Never bother the client with an issue here and there, because, not only it is annoying, but also it gives the impression that there are many things wrong with the project. Instead, make sure that the issues are captured in a document, and present this to the client when s/he is in a good mood. Inform the team that they should move forward as if there were no issues, or better still, make up the resolutions to the issues if you haven’t had time to present them to the client. You will ultimately be rewarded for your proactivity and thought leadership.
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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