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Surviving PM Pitfalls
Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.
This month, gantthead has a theme of PM Nightmares. I was thinking about what to write on that and quickly had a list of topics…a long list!
I tried to reduce the number of topics to a more manageable list, but there were still far more subjects than I could realistically write about (and certainly more than you would want to read). I have therefore decided to use this article to just provide a small number of lessons that I have learned in my career, even though they were some of the ones that made me question why I became a project manager.
The out-of-your-control schedule (with false objectives)
Very early on in my career I was faced with a project that involved implementing a new system for my organization. What made it challenging was that the schedule was completely out of my control--we had to test our implementation against another system that was to be implemented across an entire industry. Failure to pass those tests meant that we wouldn’t be allowed to do business, and the test schedule was completely inflexible. More recently, some of you may have been in a similar situation with Y2K--although the impact of that proved to be insignificant, the schedule was way out of your hands.
Very early on in my career I was faced with a project that involved implementing a new system for my organization. What made it challenging was that the schedule was completely out of my control--we had to test our implementation against another system that was to be implemented across an entire industry. Failure to pass those tests meant that we wouldn’t be allowed to do business, and the test schedule was completely inflexible. More recently, some of you may have been in a similar situation with Y2K--although the impact of that proved to be insignificant, the schedule was way out of your hands.
What gave me nightmares on this one was the fact that I felt so helpless. I was relying on a vendor to deliver software in time to meet a schedule that was being defined by …
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Very funny, Scotty. Now beam down my clothes. |