Team Focus: The End Goal

Brad Egeland is an IT/project management consultant and author with over 25 years of software development, management and project management experience leading initiatives in manufacturing, government contracting, gaming and hospitality, retail operations, aviation and airline, pharmaceutical, start-ups, healthcare, higher education, not-for-profit, high-tech, engineering and general IT.

  Requirements Management   Talent Management  

You’re the project manager. You’ve assembled (or been assigned) a team of skilled, competent and experienced project professionals ranging from data specialists to technical developers to business analysts. The schedule you’ve put together is based off of everything you’ve garnered from whoever handed the project off to you--sales, the PMO director or some account manager. What requirements that are available from the customer are in your hand and you’re ready to kick the project off and dig deeper into the requirements with the customer and some of your team by your side.

This is the easy part…sort of (as if anything is truly easy about managing a project and keeping a customer happy). At the beginning of the project everything is fresh, exciting and new. The customer is happy and enthusiastic. The budget is on track. The schedule is not behind. And your team is focused on kicking off the project with you and getting the engagement underway. As the project manager, you’ll probably never have a time during the rest of the engagement where everyone is as focused on the project and what needs to be accomplished as they all are right now. It’s sort of like when your kids are small and you wish they could be like that forever. Well, it doesn’t happen that way.

If you’ve been through this, then you know what …

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