Project Management Tips

10 Tips To Avoid A Project Failure

Do you know when your project is failing? Sometimes it doesn’t matter if you are a skilled project manager, when stress hits you, it may be too late. Here are some tips to avoid a project failure.

1. Project Manager Skill and Experience. A highly skilled and experienced project manager knows how to work with all stakeholders and participants to avoid project failures. Project management education and mentoring programs are essential and, along with experience managing projects, will greatly increase the project manager's ability to avoid project failures.
2. Use a Methodology. Using a structured systems development methodology is one of the critical success factors in a systems development project. Phase exits and quality control points help to ensure a successful project. For example, the functional design review after the functional design is completed is an often skipped, and later regretted, step. Manage requirements throughout the SDLC from initial definition to user acceptance testing at the end of the process.
3. Communicate Formally. Many projects fail or at least experience difficulties due to a lack of formal communications. Though time and focus is traditionally given to planning and scheduling, it is equally important to place a priority on regular and formal communications and interaction. For most project efforts, sending project status emails to a project distribution list with various file attachments, simply does not work. Formal communications need not be time consuming or overly bureaucratic; rather planned, agreed to, and executed as opposed to ad hoc or periodic best efforts.
4. Set Realistic Expectations Often times, unrealistic expectations are set to please a customer, to meet a calendar deadline, or to fall within a certain budget amount. Such early expectations can not only be unrealistic, but they can often become, in the eyes of the customer, the real expectations and commitments for the project leading to inevitable frustration and disappointment when they can't possibly be met. Avoid unrealistic expectations by letting the project plan set quality, cost, and time expectations, rather than early commentary and opinion.
5. Initiate the Project Properly. Not initiating a project properly with sufficient time spent to define and agree the user requirements, create a realistic plan and gain buy-in from all stakeholders’ means you're almost certainly destined for problems. Resist the temptation to start the project too early before it has been properly initiated. Don't be rushed into starting the work on the assumption that it will result in an earlier delivery. The reality is that poor initiation extends projects by causing rework, errors and omissions. Just say no when pushed and never start too early.
6. Tip 6: Ensure the Right Amount of Resources. Not having the right amount of resource or having the right amount with the wrong skill mix can be a cause of project failure. Insist that management provide appropriate resources either from internal staff or if necessary by hiring some resources on a contract basis.
7. Be Aware of Other Projects and Priorities. Don't operate in a vacuum. Project team members are often multi-tasked and may be pulled in many different directions. Ignoring these other projects and priorities will engender resentment and inaction for the team members with multiple duties. When you are unresponsive to the projects and priorities of others in times of their need, they will be unresponsive to you in times of your need.
8. Don't Forget About Quality. Everyone knows the triple constraints (Quality, Time, and Cost), but so often the management of the project has a myopic focus on budget and schedule. Quality is often left out of the picture. How often are project managers asked, "Is the project on time and on budget?" Almost always. Seek to manage and measure quality so that in addition to delivering the project on time and on budget, the product of the project fulfills the user's requirements. Project Quality Management not only will prevent rework, but enable the ROI of the project to be realized, typically a much more significant dollar amount than the project cost.
9. Collaboration technology is there to help Increasingly, organizations are seeking to do more and more with the same level of resources. Collaboration technology can help. Whether using a vendor platform or an in-house developed framework, providing access to project life cycle best practices, completed projects documentation, and project status dashboarding can play a key role in shortening project life cycle, reducing costs, and ensuring quality objectives are met. All organizations have a great deal of content and knowledge. Collaboration technology can help to make content and knowledge, especially project management related content and knowledge, accessible, usable, and online to the task at hand.
10. Maintain a Top Projects Dashboard. PPM dashboards can be an effective way to communicate the status of top projects and the direction that they are trending. In addition to cost and time, it can be very helpful and actionable to dashboard the top projects status for quality, risk, as well as how well the project aligns to strategic objectives or compliance and oversight requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley. PPM dashboards does not have to involve the use of a complex and expensive PPM tool. In fact, often times, even those organizations that have PPM tools find that a top projects dashboard can be very useful in providing the executive summary information for project status and trending, first, and prior to delving into the PPM tool for further information and analysis.