There are lots of resources and methodologies like PRINCE2 ready to help you to get things right, but what about some advice on what to do when things don’t go as planned? Project management is often highly situational, and not always formulaic. A good Project Manger needs to quickly figure out what is wrong, determine the root causes, prioritise, and take action.
What to do if a Project is in trouble?
You know your Project Management Theory, you have experience, you have:
- Set your goals and created timelines for your project.
- Leveraged your stakeholder buy-in.
- Developed a detailed budget that accounts for every penny.
What could possibly go wrong?
Anything and everything! Even the best planned projects can and probably will encounter problems
Every Project Manager will at some time be managing a project that seems to be going horribly wrong. Sometimes no matter whom you talk to or what you try, nothing seems to work to turn a project around. Maybe things are happening that are out of your control causing delays, maybe costs are escalating, maybe there is low morale among team members.
Should you forge ahead or should you abort the project? These are difficult decisions to make.
Positive things that you CAN do:
- Take a deep breath and try to detach emotionally form the project.
- Go back to your PM roots and try to take logical and achievable steps.
- Make sure all of your documentation is in order and that all stakeholders, management and team members have this information available.
- Make sure you have an approved escalation mechanism to pull the leaders into the meetings when things are going wrong.
- Ensure your stakeholders, especially the risk owners attend the status meetings, be transparent.
- Spend time with your team and get everyone to focused on hitting deliverables, try to appear positive, if you decide to keep the project going it is important that they believe it is possible.
- Discuss the project with your team members as if it is their project, get them communicating about it – get people to take ownership and involve them as much as possible
- Spend time with project sponsors and decision makers and be honest – discuss possible solutions, what’s happening, if it is relevant or viable to get the project back on track, and make a decision
Be honest about a project’s reason for being. What business objectives or strategy does it serve or support? If the project team are unable to answer this question then it is time to go back to the sponsors to clarify the answer to these fundamental questions. You need to determine whether or not there is a solid underlying business rationale for a project, and if there is not then the decision to kill a project maybe a more successful outcome than the decision to carry on. It’s hard to let go of something you have invested greatly in, however be objective and consider the benefits of effort and money saved. Team members and Project Mangers will be freed up to work on to more relevant and successful initiatives.
The more expertise you have, the more projects you handle, the more you will be able to identify what works and what doesn’t. The trick is to do more of what works! Learn as much as you can about Project Management methods, tools, and processes as you can but remember that the decision of what to do in a given situation comes down to good judgment and good decision making. If there is a good business reason to do the project, and you have the resources to get it done, you shouldn’t give up but you should look for assistance, try and get as many people as you involved to make it a success.
Similar posts you may like:
- Project Management – When Projects Go Wrong
- PRINCE 2 Exam Tips
- PRINCE2 Tolerance
- What to look for in a Project Manager
- Project Management Means People Management
Tags
project fail, project failure, project management, project management training, What do do if your project goes wrong
I think the post is just a little mixed in message, because it purports to speak to Project Managers (PMs) but the voice is often above the remit of PMs; “If you decide to keep the project going” or “Should you forge ahead or should you abort the project?” is explicit, but that level of control in going back to decide business rationale, objectives or strategy is not an option for most PMs, especially if the project has come through formal initiation (where ‘stop’ or ‘go’has already been decided). It takes bigger boots to kick it into touch, and often those feet will not move despite the PM’s insistence.
One thing unexplained is that ‘failed’ and ‘completed’ are not exclusive conditions, and that a ‘failed’ project may still return value if completed rather than abandoned. I’ve been brought in to recover and deliver projects that were ‘failing’ but could not be abandoned because the consequence of non-delivery was for instance, a massive threat to business continuance. So, whilst recovery was successful and business continuance assured, the project was in other contexts a failure; over budget, over time, over complicated, over resource and overly embarrassing for nearly everyone involved.
So, what to do when things slip? Well of course it depends on what’s causing the slip, but frequently the issues will be poor assessment of capability, complexity, commitment or confidence.
Examples would be suppliers over committing and falling behind, engineers underestimating or understating the complexity of problem and solution, work being placed with people at the limit of or beyond their capability, over-confidence leading to myopia, or lack of confidence leading to reluctance to engage.
The techniques I’ve found most useful and that correct most quickly are to bring people together in a room and open up the planning process to use the caution of some to temper the confidence of others. It’s possible to harness creativity and conservatism together if you work as a facilitator, especially if you have a very strong understanding of dependency and conflict in schedules.
This last point is the critical element, most PMs do not have clarity over interdependency across projects and their resources, and in large measure neither do their sponsors, predominately because the general technical reporting of project process by PMs is done through Gantt (ignoring traffic light indicators etc.) and many PMs fudge resource planning – there aren’t hours in the day.
When you’ve got relevant bodies in the room, the most effective technique I use is to re-plan the complete project as a PERT or network chart with complete end to end continuity. This goes up big, on paper, on the wall.
The immediate impact is that everyone can see their project contribution in the context of everyone else’s, and as we walk through the as-is project they all check and confirm dependencies, not just on a task code, but on each other’s delivery. This has the effect of altering durations and overlaps as we go, as people work the commitments to their personal schedules.
They also automatically verify the step order, and the practicality of each other’s appropriate handovers. As we walk their line, they add in missing or trim superfluous tasks, and with a pen, _sign off_ those tasks and durations, which is a personal commitment (which means they make sure it is one they can do).
This can take an hour or two and will need a break, as when Critical Path durations are added up, lo and behold, the deadline is going to be missed. That’s when the second stage starts, where ‘we’, now a cohesive group, push as much work into parallel as needed, and assign extra resource as required to make an acceptable date (which may not be the original date).
The point is, from one slightly expensive meeting, we have gained renewed credibility, solid manageable commitments, date context and dependency control. And we speak with one voice to sponsors and stakeholders about actions to be taken.