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The Little Project That Couldn’t
Dr. Andrew Makar is an IT program manager and is the author of the Microsoft Project Made Easy series. For more project management advice, visit the website TacticalProjectManagement.com.
You can’t work in this field long without experiencing a project that falters. You can, however, examine and learn from failed projects — your own and your peers' — to try to avoid some of the same minefields. Here are five fundamental lessons learned from a troubled project whose daily mantra was “every project has an end!”
Wedged between the PMBOK Guide and Quentin Fleming’s treatise on Earned Value Management, Watty Piper’s The Little Engine That Could occupies a place in my project management library. The childhood classic story — about a small engine that manages to pull a large train over a mountain after larger engines refuse — serves as an optimistic metaphor for making it through a challenged project. Unfortunately, there are also those doomed initiatives that would more aptly be tagged “The Little Project That Couldn’t.”
A few years ago, I was an analyst assigned to implement a state-of-the-art employment recruiting website. The site would position the company as the premier employer of choice during the ongoing war for talent. Two different vendors were selected for the project based on positive experiences in the past with the company. One vendor would create the design and employer brand; the other would develop the candidate tracking and assessment tools. The company’s information technology …
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"One of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important." - Bertrand Russell |