The Top Ten Reasons Projects Fail (Part 13)
Frank Winters has more than 30 years of consulting and Information Technology experience serving as a project/program manager, consultant and IT service industry executive.
Last, but not least…reason No. 10!
Inadequate communication is not the least deadly of the 10 deadly project sins; it falls to tenth position almost randomly. Misleading, inaccurate, incomplete or just plain fuzzy communication can spoil your project's chance for success as surely as any other on the list.
For example, poor status reporting by itself can ruin projects. How? By lulling stakeholders and quality assurance staff into thinking everything is okay when just the opposite is true and help is needed.
In most organizations, communication within projects must be constant and varied. From day one the project team begins to tell the world what it is doing, what is being accomplished.
Communication related to the goal must be constant because constant change is to be expected; and even if change is not occurring at the expected rate, a kind of beacon signal must go out, saying, in effect, "We are still headed in the same direction and planning on achieve the same goals." Don't let people assume anything important about your project.
What "everybody knows" about your project may be surprising
The enemy of excellent communications is the "everybody knows" syndrome, as in "Everybody knows what the project is about, what its goals are and how it will be measured." A close cousin is the rumor mill, as in "I hear they are on track to finish early" or "I hear …
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"I never resist temptation, because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me." - George Bernard Shaw |
