Run, Forrest! Run!

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.

 

I realize this is hopefully an extreme exaggeration, but what if it were true? What if you had to manage a project like it was a life or death situation? Non-project managers have to manage things in their lives as life or death situations: Doctors have to do it often, lawyers have to do it with clients facing grave circumstances. But these two examples represent other people’s lives.

What would you do if your life depended on the success or failure of the project you’re managing right now? What would you do differently to help ensure success? Anything? Everything? Do best practices stay in place or do you go after every issue and micro-manage everything? Do you blow the budget trying to maintain the schedule and customer satisfaction? It’s a pretty tough call, isn’t it?

Here’s my take on the “last project you’ll ever manage if you don’t succeed” scenario…

1. Plan for lots of planning. You never want to “over plan”--you’ll ding the project budget too much and be left with no gas as you try to cross the finish line. However, in this scenario where everything depends on the success of this one project, you must make sure that you don’t do too little planning. Over-planning is better than under-planning in this scenario; also keep a close eye on the project financials.
2. Use …

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