Signs your Project is Failing

One of the traits of the best project managers is a seemingly innate ability to spot the signs of a troubled project. Sometimes the signs are obvious, but at that point it’s often too late to save a project without a major intervention. Here are some tricks to use to spot trouble early: Check your work One of the best tests of a project’s true status is performing a demonstration of the end product. Some of the most nefarious failed projects looked perfectly fine from a management perspective: deliverables were getting delivered, stakeholders were happy, teams were buzzing with activity—but the core objectives of the project were not being delivered. Staging regular demonstrations provides a great way to check the status of the final output, and nearly anyone can readily identify whether the prototype is where it should be or miles away from the final objective. It’s difficult to fake progress, and...

Contextual Task Management

Some of the best project managers seem to have an uncanny sense of what needs to be completed by whom. If you sit in a meeting with these types, they instantly recall what activities those in the room are performing, what questions need answering, and what next steps are required. Whether interacting with individuals or teams, they’re always aware of what needs to be done in that particular environment. While project planning is second nature to most PMs, many miss out on a critical element of consideration for each task: its context. Context is occasionally the same as the person assigned a particular task, but more often it’s the environment where a task must be completed. By organizing tasks and project elements in this manner, you can quickly reflect on your current environment, and gather the tasks relevant to that environment. If you’re having a meeting with a particular team, you can...

The Power of the Tollgate

Tollgate reviews are a conceptually simple, yet extremely powerful tool for creating successful projects. Like their “real world” analogue, where a driver must pay a fee before he or she can continue driving on a particular road, a tollgate review requires that a project meet a pre-defined set of criteria, a fee of sorts, before it can continue to its next logical phase. Many project managers would scoff at this idea, explaining that they’ve already carefully defined and delineated the various phases of their project, and that a review is a key component of each one. While this is likely the case in any phased methodology, these reviews tend to be cursory, and in complex projects, the project tends to slide into the next phase by sheer momentum rather than due to a careful assessment of whether it has met its objectives. While some sort of review process is not new,...

Why organizations need Project Management

Three Questions for Project Teams

I’ve been reading the excellent book Product Strategy for High-Technology Companies, and the three elements the book suggests for a company’s visions statement are also quite apt for a project team. While I’m paraphrasing a bit, those three questions are: What does success look like? How do we get there? Why are we uniquely positioned to get there? While seemingly rather simplistic, these questions call for some critical thinking and decision making as a project is initiated. Let’s review each in more detail: What does success look like? Many project managers fail to ask this most basic of questions, and may even be smirking a bit that one would suggest asking what should be such an obvious statement. “Success is meeting the objectives of the project, and checking off all the nice little boxes on the project plan,” they quip. Not so fast. While carefully tracking and monitoring deliverables, managing critical resources, and sticking to timelines...