Month: July 2009

Linky

Project Management Is Fun!

40 Rules of Project Management

1. Nothing is impossible for the person who doesn’t have to do it.

2. You can con a sucker into committing to an impossible deadline, but you cannot con him into meeting it .

3. At the heart of every large project is a small project trying to get out.

4. A user will tell you anything you ask about, but nothing more.

5. Of several possible interpretations of a communication, the least convenient is the correct one.

6. What you don’t know hurts you.

7. There’s never enough time to do it right first time but there’s always enough time to go back and do it again.

8. The bitterness of poor quality lasts long after the sweetness of making a date is forgotten.

9. I know that you believe that you understand what you think I said, but I am not sure you realise that what you heard is not what I meant.

10. What is not on paper has not been said.

11. A little risk management saves a lot of fan cleaning.

12. If you can keep your head while all about you are losing theirs, you haven’t understood the plan.

13. If at first you don’t succeed, remove all evidence you ever tried.

14. There are no good project managers – only lucky ones.

15. The more you plan the luckier you get.

16. If everything is going exactly to plan, something somewhere is going massively wrong.

17. A project is one small step for the project sponsor, one giant leap for the project manager.

18. Good project management is not so much knowing what to do and when, as knowing what excuses to give and when.

19. Everyone asks for a strong project manager – when they get them they don’t want them.

20. Overtime is a figment of the naïve project manager’s imagination.

21. Quantitative project management is for predicting cost and schedule overruns well in advance.  Metrics are learned men’s excuses.

22. For a project manager overruns are as certain as death and taxes.

23. Some projects finish on time in spite of project management best practices.

24. Fast – cheap – good – you can have any two.

25. There is such a thing as an unrealistic timescale.

26. The project would not have been started if the truth had been told about the cost and timescale.

27. A two year project will take three years, a three year project will never finish.

28. When the weight of the project paperwork equals the weight of the project itself, the project can be considered complete.

29. A badly planned project will take three times longer than expected – a well planned project only twice as long as expected.

30. Warning: dates in a calendar are closer than they appear to be.

31. Anything that can be changed will be changed until there is no time left to change anything.

32. There is no such thing as scope creep, only scope gallop.

33. A project gets a year late one day at a time.

34. If you’re 6 months late on a milestone due next week but really believe you can make it, you’re a project manager.

35. No project has ever finished on time, within budget, to requirement – yours won’t be the first to.

36. Managing IT people is like herding cats.

37. If you don’t know how to do a task, start it, then ten people who know less than you will tell you how to do it.

38. The person who says it will take the longest and cost the most is the only one with a clue how to do the job.

39. The sooner you get behind schedule, the more time you have to make it up.

40. The nice thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise rather than being preceded by a period of worry and depression.

Linky

10 Ways To Make Projects Fail

Reasons Why Projects Fail

Project Failure
Project Failure

Even though Project Management has become a respected and well-known profession in modern times, in some circles, the belief still persists that getting work done through projects is a waste of time. This is especially true for people who have seen many projects start with a bang only to fail miserably later on.

Let’s look at some causes for project failure that leads to or re-enforces the belief that projects and having a management-by-project approach is a waste of time and money.

Failure can easily be the outcome of a project if you ignore some core principles.

The 10 ways to FAIL projects are:

  1. Don’t analyse the precise Business Needs for a project. Just start the work.
  2. Don’t bother to define Business Benefits as derived from business needs being met.  This way no benefits are realised as none were expected in the first place.
  3. Don’t waste time with Detail Planning. A high level plan, or a graphical picture of the end result, is good enough to show people what the goals are and to get them going.
  4. Don’t bother identifying Tangible Deliverables for a project. Too much documentation is a waste of paper and who will read it anyway? Just fix your attention on the end goal.
  5. Use any available Resources (people), as long as the work gets done. Don’t waste time on precise role descriptions and finding the right people to do the job.
  6. Don’t make the Project Manager Responsible and Accountable for the project outcome. Accountability should come from the project team members. Keep them responsible to make the project happen.
  7. Once a project plan is in place, don’t bother to Follow-up. Each person should commit to what they need to do and that’s it.
  8. Communication should be just enough to keep the project on track, don’t over-complicate things by communicating too much or too often.  Stakeholders (people with a vested interest in the project) can ask if they need more information.
  9. When a project team starts working together, they will build their own momentum without the project manager facilitating the process. Teams will work together without Team Building and Team Development.
  10. As long as the project manager is technically competent, the Leadership abilities can always be developed later.

Surely, you will recognize some of these symptoms of failing projects that you have witnessed or that you may have been a part of.  As stupid as it may sound, if even 3 or more of the principles are lacking (not present) in any project, it is doomed to fail. A failed project is recognized by the fact that it is late, over budget and/or it lacks quality, which means it did not deliver according to requirements and expectations as agreed up-front.  Worst of all, the project was never finished! (Have you ever heard of sunk money?  This is usually how projects are referred to when they are cancelled half-way).

Project Success
Project Success

Now go and re-read the 10 ways to fail projects. See if you can recognise the CORE PRINCIPLES that you need to follow to ensure a successful outcome for your business projects.  Please feel free to add principles or give comments on your experiences of project failures…..

For more Project Management articles, click here

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Leaders Must Adapt To Change

Leaders Must Balance The Temperature

Thermostat

By Tom Atema

Leaders deal with the future, they see a better tomorrow, so they care for today.

This kind of mind and purpose means leaders must adapt to the temperature of today in order to meet the new challenges tomorrow. Today’s leader has to set the leadership thermostat so they are able to adapt to the fast-paced challenges that come their way almost hourly. Today’s challenges bring us into unchartered territory, a place where no one has ever been before.

However, two things are becoming very clear. This is where leaders must take note.

First, any organization that is built on/or operates solely from top down (you do as I say) leadership risks failure. Today, the rules of how an organization is led have changed, like it or not. Today organizations have to move, adjust the organization thermostat to meet the challenges of today. As the thermostat of the organization is moved, change will be needed; a dumping of old habits and the reshaping of how people interact with each other inside the organization has to change or be reshaped. Today the role of each employee has been redefined; each one is a leader and has to be allowed to lead. Top leaders must equip employees with character, skill and thinking formation. All three are needed because they set the environment of the organization. If the heat is too low people get very comfortable and will not make difficult decisions on their own. If the heat is too high, they will jump ship for cooler water.

Second – any organization that believes they can do what they do in a vacuum is done. The truth is we must hit the thermostat and balance the temperature of the organization with others and get out of the “one organization can do it all,” which has placed way too many in the “auto-pilot” mode. Some organizations that have done so have seen some parts of their organization die. And probably the parts that die should have done so years ago! In today’s world, if organizations do not partner, drop their egos and logos, and change the way they operate, they will not last.

After all, if we do today what we did yesterday, we will stay in the mess tomorrow because of the mess we created yesterday.

These are the best of times! Why? Because without the high temperature and the urgency this worldwide crisis has produced I don’t think we would have the heart or the stomach to make the necessary adjustments, the very hard calls that will make us more effective tomorrow.

So LEADER, keep your hand on that thermostat –keep adjusting it to the times.

Related article on Leadership, “Vision Requires Logic And Emotion”

Articles on Project Management: “Project Management’s Golden Ratio“