Request Management Gremlins

  Requirements Management   ProjectsAtWork  

Poor request management will get your project off to a bad start from which it may never recover. Here are four recurring request management issues that derail project, program and portfolio effectiveness, from the gathering to prioritizing and tracking of them. How many sound familiar?

It’s hard to make up for a bad start. Just ask any Olympic sprinter. Stumbling at the starting block results in lost time, wasted energy and a loss momentum that can make it virtually impossible to capture the victory. As with sprinting, so it is with work management. Too often, like invisible gremlins, recurring request management issues get projects off to a bad start, jeopardizing your effectiveness, morale and, ultimately, your projects themselves.

So what are these recurring request management gremlins? They reside in your work processes and software. Although they tend to take many forms, they can be placed in four major categories:

1. Requestor tracking

After the initial email, sticky note, or drive-by, despite your best efforts, you tend to forget some information, like who the request came from in the first place. With all the requests received and all the tasks undertaken, this makes it very difficult to track projects and resources back to specific requestors. And this creates problems in terms of accountability, process intelligence, and team trust.

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