Project Management: So, Where Does it Hurt?
Author:
March 2007
Everyone who has had the need to visit their physician knows this is a question that gets asked in one form or another. A simple question? It should be, but sometimes it really isn't that easy to answer with certainty, since the source of pain can be deceiving, especially if you have been living with it for some time.
As Eric speaks to elsewhere in this newsletter, the initial stages of the pain cycle can be particularly elusive to identify, simply because you become resolute that you are not really sick at all ("It's just a bad day…") or "I'm not sick - it's just that everyone else around me is!" Projects and organizations have exactly the same problems. They start to show symptoms of sickness a long time before any action is actually taken to remedy the situation. Occasionally these troubled projects do cure themselves, but it's not typical without some conscious attention. Have any of you had a simple cold turn into pneumonia simply because you didn't attend to it early in the lifecycle? So how do we gain visibility to problems early on in project or organization lifecycles? The early indications tend to look fairly innocuous, but they slowly (sometimes, almost imperceptibly) grow as time goes on.
- Early symptoms include: Lack of project status and business benefits updates
- Lack of stakeholder communication
- A barrier against independent quality assurance These should be considered warning signs. They are signs of denial -- a protectionist stance that problems are not severe enough to make a big deal about. "The problem will go away tomorrow." Later symptoms include:
- Excessive efforts required on a continual basis
- Regularly missing cost & schedule milestones
- High staff turnover
- Aggressive and/or defensive behavior
- The teams aren't having fun anymore
At the point that no one can smile anymore and the team is in continual fights over who is to blame, you have a project in very serious trouble. If you are not sure about any of these symptoms, then there is one sure-fire test you can apply - request that the project be stopped for a formal review. If the answer you receive is: "We can't hold up the project to assess what's going wrong - we have a deadline to meet!" GET IT TO THE EMERGENCY ROOM NOW!!
Dave Deakin can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
