This post will provide you--and more importantly, your enterprise--with one of the most effective tools in stacking the project management deck in favor of success. Read on to discover how you can leverage project mistakes into your own proven corporate/professional success strategy.
Caution: An unguided "learn from mistakes" methodology can, and will, expose the entire project environment to an enormous risk of failure.
Our respective enterprises continue to realize the value of establishing a formal process for approaching and managing projects. This is a good thing, right? Well...yes, and no. Unfortunately, we tend to fast-track project managers into the process--frequently without a solid background in achieving expected results. These new project personnel may have read all the right books and/or taken the right certification courses, but are they, indeed, going to succeed in managing their own projects?
Recently, I reviewed an article by Paul Glen posted on the ZDNet-Asia entitled: "First-time project managers need failures." I tend to agree with much of Mr. Glen's post. However, I think we are missing a significant success process within the project management framework.
A well-thought-out process for genuinely utilizing accurate lessons learned can fast track the entire project environment to higher levels of success.
While we will all most frequently learn the most from our failures, those same failures could easily expose our sponsors/stakeholders to serious--and unnecessary--financial/operational risk. Instead of merely encouraging new project managers to make mistakes, perhaps it would be more productive for the enterprise to establish a more effective record-keeping process (as in more thorough lessons learned documents).
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The current trend in project management for many companies revolves around a: “Ready… Fire!... Aim…” approach. A distressing number of companies honestly believes in rapidly ramping up projects and letting them fail or succeed through sheer force of will. In fact, companies very frequently will actually punish project managers (or any other employee) for spending more than a minimum amount of time on effective planning.
Sadly, the common management illusion is that “…time spent planning is time wasted…” Read on for some real world perspectives and ideas for how you can reverse this self-defeating trend and put projects back on the success track.
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This presentation was delivered at The University of Akron in Akron, Ohio as part of the Professional Development Series in Project Management. Project Team Membership discusses major issues and resolutions to building and maintaining a project team.
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Presentation delivered at The University of Akron in Akron, Ohio, for Project Management Professional Development Program. Enhancing Project Success discusses the statistical reasons that projects tend to fail as well as potential methods for preventing those failures.
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