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Top 10 Worst Project Management Excuses

February 12, 2008 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Project Management Musings

Top 10 Worst Project Management Excuses
By Eric E. Ellis

Now that I’ve had a number of project management years under my belt, I thought I’d share with you the top 10 worst excuses I’ve heard from other project managers when trying to get work done. Can you come up with others?

1. MS Project is a challenge (I don’t know how to use Microsoft Project)
2. Resource output is not meeting expectations (My software developers won’t listen to me)
3. The critical path is constantly shifting (I don’t know what a critical path is)
4. Business partner-driven change requests are disrupting our normal work routines (I don’t have a backbone to stand up to my partners and say no)
5. Our financial burn rate will not meet project demands (I miscalculated the budget)
6. Our three-day planning session should have been extended to five days (We spent 80% of our time arguing over the wrong stuff)
7. We must push our rollout date out three weeks due to scope creep (I don’t know how to manage scope creep)
8. The majority of my day is spent writing useless reports to top executives (I don’t know how my project is doing on any given day)
9. My business partners don’t know how difficult this work is (I haven’t educated my business partners about the complexities of the project)
10. I don’t need any help (I need help!).

A Cincinnati, Ohio pseudo-native (he wasn’t born there but should’ve been fed Skyline Chili at birth), web designer and project manager Eric E. Ellis is a web-geek-convert. He started his career with an eCommerce business background but slowly made the transition to designer/developer/project manager as Web 2.0 started its climb in 2003.

Today, through his freelance company ProjectEric.com, Eric continues to work for small business clients in the web design arena throughout the country.

Eric maintains a professional blog at http://blog.projecteric.com

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 12th, 2008 and is filed under Project Management Musings. 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.

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