There’s any amount of advice out there on what you SHOULD do as part of the project management process, so it makes a refreshing change to come across some ideas about things you SHOULDN’T do.
Stephen Seay’s blog provides just such a list, some of which are listed below:
Don’t believe everything you are told about a potential project’s benefits. Investigate for yourself and plan accordingly. Don’t take on a project that doesn’t have a strong sponsor that is committed to seeing the project succeed.
These are interesting ones, because the role of the project manager is often synonymous (or confused) with project cheerleader. To an extent that’s natural – after all, it’s not good for the soul to be running too many projects you’re not enthused about; but there are fine lines between enthusiasm, optimism and over-confidence. One of the most important roles a PM can perform is acting as a questioner of assumptions when it comes to the project’s benefits. If those benefits aren’t delivered, you can bet that it won’t be the sponsor who’s criticised for over-selling the potential – it’ll be the PM who picks up the blame for under-delivery, even if the benefits were unachievable in the first place.
Don’t forget that most project assumptions should also be risks.
This definitely falls into the category of “obvious, but ignored”. The clue is in the word – “assumption” is simply a more business-friendly alternative to the word “guess” – so if you were in any doubt as to why this was important, just try rewriting your project initiation documents substituting the two words, and see how it looks. Ideally, the initial risk log would be the mirror-image of the assumptions, with contingencies set accordingly.
Don’t set project expectations that are higher than reality can deliver. Don’t forget to manage customer expectations.
These two are linked in my opinion, and can be summed up as “under-promise, over-deliver”. Unless over-delivery itself is likely to cause problems – projects don’t exist in a vacuum, so cranking up the volume out of yours isn’t necessarily a good thing for someone else downstream.
All in, the list is a useful mental checklist to have at the back of your mind – the full posting is here.
