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Rescuing a Project: Diagnosis

November 26, 2009 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Project Management Best Practices, Project Management Musings, Risk Management

Rescuing a Project: Diagnosis
By Joanne Wortman

I earlier talked about performing triage on a project portfolio. The result of the triage effort is to identify those projects most in need of immediate intervention. Just as in the medical world, the next step after triage is diagnosis; now it’s time to focus on projects in the third group and perform project diagnostics. If you are tasked with rescuing a failing project, here are the first steps that you should take to find the root cause(s) of the project’s difficulties.

  1. Obtain a thorough patient history: Skilled medical diagnosticians may not rely solely on the patient’s recollection. In some cases they need to interview family and friends to obtain information on subtle symptoms. When trying to diagnose failing projects, they shouldn’t don’t rely solely on direct interviews of the project team. A multi-perspective view of the situation is needed:

    • Have a closed-door session with the project sponsor: Find out what the key issues are with the project and begin to explore areas where a rescoping might help bring things back on track. Find out what kind of scope reductions are likely to be accepted by the business, and which might require significant salesmanship or a fierce battle. Understand the organization’s politics so that you can factor them into your corrective action plan.

    • Talk to the project stakeholders about their original expectations, their current concerns, and any difficulties they may be experiencing with the project team.

    • Create comfortable communication channels with all members of the project team, and dig deeper than project plans, status reports and issues logs. Find out what is causing project anxiety within the team. There are often valuable clues here. Be sure to probe any areas that are glossed over or brushed aside quickly.

  2. Take the project’s vital signs:

    • Pulse check: Assess the burn rate. Are you eating up budget faster than you anticipated? What is the new estimated total cost?

    • Blood pressure: Perform a risk assessment, in terms of what could happen between now and the go live date to cause a significant incident. Various frameworks exist for this assessment. The Six Sigma FMEA (Failure Mode and Effect Analysis) template can be modified to suit your needs here, giving you an objective framework for assessing all possible places where your solution could fail, and steering your future corrective actions toward those that have both the highest likelihood of occurrence and greatest criticality.

    • Temperature: Create a heat sheet (red yellow green) with respect to key milestones. This should be part of your regular status report, along with some basic trending.

    • Other specialized diagnostic tests as needed - Assess the scope (original and current), review the technology strategy, development strategy, testing strategy, release strategy and change management strategies.

After performing these steps, you should have insight into why the project has gotten off track.

Joanne Wortman, JWortman@edgewater.com, Director of Consulting, Edgewater Technology, Inc.

Joanne Wortman has been leading complex technology projects, M&A integration programs, business process reengineering efforts and change management initiatives for more than a decade. Her work has been published in Buyouts Magazine and at www.vcexperts.com. Ms. Wortman holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Edgewater Technology, Inc. is an innovative technology management consulting firm. We provide a unique blend of specialty IT services by leveraging our proven industry expertise in strategy, technology and enterprise performance management. Headquartered in Wakefield, MA, we go to market by vertical industry and provide our clients with a wide range of business and technology offerings.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, November 26th, 2009 and is filed under Project Management Best Practices, Project Management Musings, Risk Management. 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.

3 people have left comments

Joanne

This is an excellent post. I really like your medical analogy and believe that it’s completely apropos. I’d add that many times the patient is in complete denial and blames the doctors (consultants like you and me).

Phil

Phil Simon wrote on November 27, 2009 - 5:32 am | Visit Link

Joanne,

I agree w/ Phil that this is a great post. Very concise! I too like the medical analogy. The closed door session idea is a good one. Perhaps your readers would also like to see the following on change management http://pm.blogs.com/the_project_management_bl/2009/07/why-a-change-order-isnt-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it.html as well as this post on metrics, which might help a project from getting too far into the “immediate intervention” category - http://pm.blogs.com/the_project_management_bl/2009/10/project-management-metrics.html.

Laura Bamberg wrote on December 1, 2009 - 3:59 pm | Visit Link

[...] performed project triage. You’ve run the required diagnostic tests. It takes more than a diagnosis to avoid more implementation failures. Now [...]

Restoring Projects to Peak Performance - PM Hut wrote on December 14, 2009 - 10:09 am | Visit Link

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