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Project Selection Pitfalls to Avoid
January 4, 2010 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Miscellaneous
Project Selection Pitfalls to Avoid
By Michael D. Taylor
Project Selection Team
Generally, new projects are selected by a team of corporate stakeholders including executive managers, financial managers, functional managers, marketing and sales personnel, production managers, project managers, and others as needed. Each brings their individual points of view. The objective of this Project Selection Team (PST) is to identify and select the projects which will produce the best products and services based on the corporate competencies.
Whenever a group of high-powered individuals attempt to reach a common agreement there will be conflict. Is such conflict bad? Certainly not. However, a united decision must ultimately be made by the PST.
Pitfalls to Avoid
In order to select the best possible new projects the corporate selection team should avoid the following pitfalls:
- Selecting new projects that are not based on corporate competencies.
- Failing to select new projects that are aligned to corporate strategies.
- Neglecting to consider outsourcing as an alternative to upsizing when taking on new projects.
- Selecting new projects without subjecting them to a rigorous feasibility study, including an assessment of potential risks.
- Selecting new projects that are based on the interests of only a few key corporate stakeholders.
- Taking too long to authorize projects that are to be completed before a fixed market-window date.
MICHAEL D. TAYLOR, M.S. in systems management, B.S. in electrical engineering, has more than 30 years of project, outsourcing, and engineering experience. He is principal of Systems Management Services, and has conducted project management training at the University of California, Santa Cruz Extension in their PPM Certificate program for over 13 years, and at companies such as Sun Microsystems, GTE, Siemens, TRW, Loral, Santa Clara Valley Water District, and Inprise. He also taught courses in the UCSC Extension Leadership and Management Program (LAMP), and was a guest speaker at the 2001 Santa Cruz Technology Symposium. His website is www.projectmgt.com.
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5 people have left comments
Good points!
I will also add: conduct several project selection meetings which are not aligned and managed by the same body- cause to resources over allocation, different cost estimation models and so.
Gilad
Michael, this was well-said. You covered just about all of it. Unfortunately, this happens more often than it should and it is virtually impossible to recover when it does.
Construct a wishlist of potential projects. And also add not selected projects to the wishlist register, maybe in a month or two you or the market will be ready for those ideas.
Hi Michael,
Shouldn’t it be to produce “profitable” products and services (of course quality should be a given)?
At any rate, it’s worth mentioning the use of selection criteria. Written criteria can be reviewed at the start of each selection meeting to refresh everyone’s memory regarding which are most important in determining which projects to take on, and to allow comments on potential changes/improvements to the criteria themselves.
Having written criteria is nice too in that it keeps everyone on the same page with respect to the common goal. You still have to role based conflict (a good thing, I agree) to drive needed debate and follow on research.
Good luck.
[...] order to reach a united agreement, the Project Selection Team (PST) must first establish selection criteria. Each criterion must then be assigned a specific [...]