5 Ways to Tame Your Wild Project

Carleton Chinner is the Managing Director of MagniStrat, a Brisbane, Australia-based project consultancy specializing in program capability maturity improvement. Carleton works on large complex projects and is often called upon to speak about his experiences.

  Change Management   Risk Management  

If you have been in the project management business for a while, you will almost certainly have come across a project that is spiraling out of control. I’ve seen several over the years:

• Runaway scope on a software development project, where the programming team had been enticed to work 70-hour weeks by promising them a substantial share offer when they delivered the solution.
• Then there was flaky third-party product quality on a large infrastructure project.
• And last, there was my perennial favorite, the government project that ran over an election period…leading to most of the key stakeholders being changed as a new party got into power.

Most of these projects may sound like they were destined to fail. However, in each case, it was possible to refactor the project so that success was possible.

If you face a similar problem, here are a few ways that you can tame your own wild project.

1. Recognize the early signs of chaos
Out-of-control projects almost never happen all at once. They sneak in as “small increments.”

Rampant scope creep starts with statements like, “We would like a minor change” or “We have identified a quick win.”

Many project issues start when the product engineers are beginning to complain about things that don’t work. How much attention their grumbles receive is up to the …

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