How Healthy is your Project?

June 19, 2008 | Author: admin | Filed under: Miscellaneous

How Healthy is your Project?
By Ron Rosenhead

Some time ago I went to my own doctor. He is a sarcastic man who is an excellent diagnostician. I asked him a simple question;

Do you do health checks for males?” His answer rather startled me.

“Waste of time, you can have all the tests come back normal and while here in the surgery you could have a heart attack and die!”

I reflected that I felt OK!!

After my sobering walk home I asked myself what about clients’ projects? How healthy are they? Will their project suddenly drop dead? Are they being starved of nutrients -cash and resources?

I do not know the real answer to this question but I can probably guess:

which projects will struggle to deliver
which projects need more resources
which projects should be put out of their misery…..I’m not usually a proponent of euthanasia

Clearly, some project boards do check that a project is progressing. But, this seems to be really short term i.e. are you going to hit your milestones? If yes, fine, but the key is what about the longer term?.

Nor do organisations examine how healthy project management is within the company. Is it really working for the organisation? Is it really delivering those changes that the business wants?

Too often we see that people are delivering in the same way as they always have done. The old saying is:

If you always did what you’ve always done, you will always get what you always got.

About Ron Rosenhead (In his own words)

I first became involved in project management quite accidentally! While working in a large organisation which was going through huge change I realised that these changes would only be successful if people delivered projects effectively. But, no one had received any training in this area!

I ran a series of workshops and saw that this was an important area - working to help organisations deliver projects on time and to budget.

I have personally trained many thousands of people to deliver projects effectively. In addition, I have spoken at conferences, coached individuals and worked with project teams. After encouragement from a couple of grateful workshop participants I wrote Deliver That Project - a practical guide to delivering projects.

Alongside this my big project is to make my company Project Agency even more successful. We work with a wide range of clients providing them with project management training alongside developing in-house project management systems to ensure a uniform approach to project delivery.

Share this article:

Related Articles

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 19th, 2008 and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

No comments yet.

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=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>

All fields marked with " * " are required.

Tactical Scope Creep

Make or Break: Why Accurate Cost Estimation Is Key

Lessons Learned for Project Managers - Part XIII

Project Implementation - Training

Risk Characteristics

Clarity - MS Project Best Practices

Reasons for not Having the Right Project Sponsorship

Operations and Maintenance - Lessons Learned from Major Programs

Lessons Learned for Project Managers - Part XII

Quality Control in Project Management

How Healthy is your Project?

feel free to leave a comment