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A Handy List of Project Management Excuses - Part II

October 15, 2008 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Project Management Musings

A Handy List of Project Management Excuses - Part II
By Andrew Meyer

Welcome to our new and revised excuse list. People suggested many excellent excuses, some of which even I haven’t used. The idea of this list, is that rather than long winded excuses being given in meetings, people can simply give numbers.

Project Manager 1: “We’re working hard, but we’ve got 2 and 19 holding us up.”
Project Manager 2: “We are in good shape, but we’re being hurt by 8, 22 and 30.”

You get the point. Suggestions are always welcome.

  1. We’ve got scope creep. I don’t know where it came from, but have you seen this cool little widget we’ve added…
  2. How come we never have enough money? Honest, if I could just get this one other tool…
  3. The requirements weren’t defined. Why do I have to keep going to all these meetings, I mean, I’ve already started coding…
  4. The requirements keep changing. Every time I talk to someone, they want something different. It’s not worth writing them down…
  5. There’s a bug in the (Pick one or more: vendors, downstream app, upstream app, operating system, monitoring system, security… our software)
  6. The new software we bought doesn’t work the way we want. It looked so easy when the sales…
  7. We haven’t heard back from the software vendor, we filed the report (Pick one: weeks ago, months ago, yesterday… 5 minutes before coming to this meeting)
  8. The project manager from company XXX isn’t here today, all the problems are with XXX…
  9. Testing found something we hadn’t expected, it will (Pick one: double, triple…)
  10. There’s a holiday in XXX’s country. They won’t be back before Monday. There’s nothing we can do until…

Andrew Meyer studied systems and industrial engineering before spending fifteen years implementing global IT and Business Process Re-Engineering projects. Frustrated with seeing communication issues hurt projects again and again, he returned to get his MBA from the University of Southern California and focused on project communications and risk management. To apply this to real-world problems, Andrew founded the Capability Alignment Professionals (http://www.CompanyAlign.com), which is dedicated to aligning incentives and encouraging communications. He discusses these issues in his blog Inquiries Into Alignment (http://alignmentinquiries.blogspot.com/)

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