Prevent Projects coming under Fire
Generally all projects are Susceptible to things going wrong at some stage due to lack of timely funding or resources or team member missing or any other climatic environmental or customer or any back end lack of support issue.
The best part is everybody still expects results with quality and timeliness. How do you prevent projects failing or getting burned out or preventing rework or wasting further resources
The fact of the matter is success of project still lies in its execution regardless of all difficulties
To begin with get the act together in following ways:
Scope Perform a feasibility study to gauge market potential, enterprise risk/benefit and technological impact before any activities are started.Make sure that the project has a designated business champion, and gather the necessary business and technological criteria to justify the project to continue adequate executive support during the life cycle.
Planning: Make project goals attainable by prioritizing deliverable to keep a team tightly focused on specific issues.
From there, involve the team, stakeholders and sponsors in closely managed sessions to discuss each objective and clearly explain risks and benefits to understand exposures and the dangers to the project,
In order to keep to delivery dates, it is often necessary to deliver a streamlined application or site with enhancements coming in regular scheduled intervals. Open communication at this point is critical to maintain expectations. Meet weekly with stakeholders to keep scope creep to a minimum.
Automate the requirements management process whenever possible to provide a central location for audit trails and status management.
Don’t overload milestones: Keep the milestones actionable, and keep them close together
Publicize your plans: Distribute regular and relevant status information in the most accessible way possible, for example, e-mail, intranet project pages or an enterprise project management tool. The more people who are intimately familiar with project requirements and action plans, the less cause there is for a misstep.
Delegate: A project manager cannot, and should not, do it all. Use the team approach whenever possible for planning and execution, guided by the project lead.
Manage vendors: A single location for critical documentation and communication is essential. For project execution, designate a single source, whether it is the project manager or a lead technical person, to be the single point of contact for any vendor issues. Clarify expectations for reporting, issue management and deliver ables and penalties for not meeting those expectations.
Execution/Control
Delegate, part two: The small-team approach allows a project team to remain flexible and not get bogged down in the minutiae. Even if a project is large in scale, the small team works effectively.
Empower project or team leaders to manage tasks within their areas of expertise and work closely to keep communication open.
Keep everyone on task by meeting formally on a weekly basis to review and measure against milestones, but meet daily on an informal basis to head off possible problems as quickly as possible.
Automate whenever possible: Make automation as accessible as possible. Allow team members to track time and issues that keep project managers and team members informed of progress and assist in avoiding miscommunication regarding objectives.
Team members perform much more effectively if they are in active communication with each other so that each dependency is clearly understood and managed. Hold weekly information sessions with the team to discuss issues, and collectively figure out correction strategies. If the team is scattered, use collaborative tools
Use audits: To assess the health of the project, hold biweekly audit sessions, and check the status and progress of the project. Issues discussed during an audit are actual progress vs. work and cost estimates, requirements measurement for scope control and overall quality measurements in productivity. The actual audit process is very flexible; using the project charter as a guide, the team prepares criteria that measure the entire project, and then uses subsets of those criteria for assessment with each milestone
Measure productivity: You can’t improve if you don’t measure. Develop standard criteria for measurement, such as meeting deliverables, defect detection, resource utilization and rework, to find out where you can optimize or where you need to devote extra attention
Practice change control: Regardless of project size, if change control is not practiced, the project won’t meet deliverables and will miss delivery dates.
Test: It is critical to test early and often to ensure that the project is meeting deliverables and is production-ready
Design concise implementation procedures: Develop a step-by-step implementation plan that covers production test procedures, installation requirements as well as a contingency plan for problem management that includes back-out procedures and production support steps. Accompanying documentation must include release information
Closure:
Conduct a postmortem: This is the time to hash out any issues that will improve production support and improve process for the next project. Be sure to collect all project issues that caused any delays restructuring of project focus, implementation issues and “morning after” support problems. Like audits and walkthroughs, these are not forums for personal criticism, but are used to analyze procedures for improvement.
Check temperature: Assess project success at several intervals after implementation to measure how well the project met expectations. This important metric delivers the foundation for future project growth. For example, if there are high levels of production support or rework, check the requirements and design processes; chances are, there was something critical missed during this phase where easy corrections were possible.
The best part is everybody still expects results with quality and timeliness. How do you prevent projects failing or getting burned out or preventing rework or wasting further resources
The fact of the matter is success of project still lies in its execution regardless of all difficulties
To begin with get the act together in following ways:
Scope Perform a feasibility study to gauge market potential, enterprise risk/benefit and technological impact before any activities are started.Make sure that the project has a designated business champion, and gather the necessary business and technological criteria to justify the project to continue adequate executive support during the life cycle.
Planning: Make project goals attainable by prioritizing deliverable to keep a team tightly focused on specific issues.
From there, involve the team, stakeholders and sponsors in closely managed sessions to discuss each objective and clearly explain risks and benefits to understand exposures and the dangers to the project,
In order to keep to delivery dates, it is often necessary to deliver a streamlined application or site with enhancements coming in regular scheduled intervals. Open communication at this point is critical to maintain expectations. Meet weekly with stakeholders to keep scope creep to a minimum.
Automate the requirements management process whenever possible to provide a central location for audit trails and status management.
Don’t overload milestones: Keep the milestones actionable, and keep them close together
Publicize your plans: Distribute regular and relevant status information in the most accessible way possible, for example, e-mail, intranet project pages or an enterprise project management tool. The more people who are intimately familiar with project requirements and action plans, the less cause there is for a misstep.
Delegate: A project manager cannot, and should not, do it all. Use the team approach whenever possible for planning and execution, guided by the project lead.
Manage vendors: A single location for critical documentation and communication is essential. For project execution, designate a single source, whether it is the project manager or a lead technical person, to be the single point of contact for any vendor issues. Clarify expectations for reporting, issue management and deliver ables and penalties for not meeting those expectations.
Execution/Control
Delegate, part two: The small-team approach allows a project team to remain flexible and not get bogged down in the minutiae. Even if a project is large in scale, the small team works effectively.
Empower project or team leaders to manage tasks within their areas of expertise and work closely to keep communication open.
Keep everyone on task by meeting formally on a weekly basis to review and measure against milestones, but meet daily on an informal basis to head off possible problems as quickly as possible.
Automate whenever possible: Make automation as accessible as possible. Allow team members to track time and issues that keep project managers and team members informed of progress and assist in avoiding miscommunication regarding objectives.
Team members perform much more effectively if they are in active communication with each other so that each dependency is clearly understood and managed. Hold weekly information sessions with the team to discuss issues, and collectively figure out correction strategies. If the team is scattered, use collaborative tools
Use audits: To assess the health of the project, hold biweekly audit sessions, and check the status and progress of the project. Issues discussed during an audit are actual progress vs. work and cost estimates, requirements measurement for scope control and overall quality measurements in productivity. The actual audit process is very flexible; using the project charter as a guide, the team prepares criteria that measure the entire project, and then uses subsets of those criteria for assessment with each milestone
Measure productivity: You can’t improve if you don’t measure. Develop standard criteria for measurement, such as meeting deliverables, defect detection, resource utilization and rework, to find out where you can optimize or where you need to devote extra attention
Practice change control: Regardless of project size, if change control is not practiced, the project won’t meet deliverables and will miss delivery dates.
Test: It is critical to test early and often to ensure that the project is meeting deliverables and is production-ready
Design concise implementation procedures: Develop a step-by-step implementation plan that covers production test procedures, installation requirements as well as a contingency plan for problem management that includes back-out procedures and production support steps. Accompanying documentation must include release information
Closure:
Conduct a postmortem: This is the time to hash out any issues that will improve production support and improve process for the next project. Be sure to collect all project issues that caused any delays restructuring of project focus, implementation issues and “morning after” support problems. Like audits and walkthroughs, these are not forums for personal criticism, but are used to analyze procedures for improvement.
Check temperature: Assess project success at several intervals after implementation to measure how well the project met expectations. This important metric delivers the foundation for future project growth. For example, if there are high levels of production support or rework, check the requirements and design processes; chances are, there was something critical missed during this phase where easy corrections were possible.
