Practical Advice for Software Implementation Project Managers

How  is it possible that an effective project manager with over 10 years of experience leading software projects could burn through three months of effort for a “simple project” that was supposed to take three weeks? Well, it happened to me, but it doesn’t have to happen to you, if you are smart enough to learn from my mistakes!

Risk management is a topic receiving a lot of deserving attention in the project management community. The moment that anything unexpected has a dramatic negative impact on one of our projects, we become very receptive to learning what we could have done differently to avoid or at least to have anticipated such problems. This is the essential nature of a risk management plan: to spend some time during development of the project plan to think about what might go wrong and to take action to prevent or detect those problems. While other authors have done a fine job of explaining risk management theory, I hope to add to the discussion by offering some practical advice based on my own experience specifically to equip project managers who take on a software implementation project.

My nightmare software implementation project began in February 2008 and was expected to be completed before the end of the month. Our company had been using a third-party document management system for about five years without installing any…