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13 Ways to Guarantee Project Failure - Part V
August 28, 2008 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Project Management Musings
13 Ways to Guarantee Project Failure - Part V (#5 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.
#9: Only hold your project team, not the client, wholly accountable for tasks.
If, for some reason, you’ve assigned tasks on your project plan to the client (shame on you), make sure you don’t follow up on those to get status updates. Because the client is completely invested in the project, you should be able to count on them to perform all of their tasks with the highest quality. Your project team, on the other hand, as high-performing as they are, need to be micro-managed to complete their tasks on-time and on-budget. You should also take the opportunity to challenge your project team to perform, by calling them out in front of the client for tasks they haven’t yet completed. Negative reinforcement is a powerful motivational technique, and you should use it often.
#10: Don’t let minor changes to scope affect your project plan. You’ll still be able to hit your dates.
The client is always allowed to change their minds on decisions, no matter how big or small. They should be considered as minor roadblocks to achieving your goal of finishing the project on-time and on-budget. While you’ve established a cumbersome process for running the project, you don’t need to do the same thing for tracking any and all changes that come up.
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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