Six Warning Signs Your Project is in Danger

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.

  Risk Management  

Don’t you wish your project had a smoke alarm on it? Some high-pitched screech that told you that things are getting out of whack and you better take action soon or you’re going to be in trouble? That would be great or very annoying…I’m just not sure which. But the advanced warning would be a nice feature. Since we don’t have such a luxury, I’ve created a list of what I consider to be six big warning signs that the project you’re managing may be in real danger of tanking. Watch for these and similar signs and take action as quickly as possible…

1. You’re creating too many change orders. Change orders are fine when they are identifying new work your customer is asking for. But if they are just being created to close the gap between the real need and poorly defined requirements, then you have a real problem on your hands. It’s an indication that you started the project before the real planning was done, and it’s also an indication that you’ll be fighting this battle throughout the entire engagement. And in the end, you’re likely to have a very frustrated, dissatisfied and cash-strapped project customer.
2. You’ve missed more than one deliverable deadline. One is acceptable, especially if you have a good explanation ready for your customer (notice that I said “explanation”,…

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