Organizing a Charge

Kenneth has 14 years of healthcare experience in government and private industry. Over eight years of experience managing healthcare IT projects, operations, contracts, and personnel. His work experience includes project management, contracts and procurements, data analysis, claims adjudication, business writing, and business process modeling. Kenneth was certified in 2006 as a Project Management Professional.

 

“Charge!” yells the project manager.

Then he looks around and sees a big empty conference room. Nobody is following the command. Now the project manager might have to charge up the hill all by himself, which is not be a good idea.

Perhaps your project has been stumbling along--requirements sessions were too short, the design phase is running over or there are just not enough hours in a workday to finish everything. Something in the project plan has gone awry and something needs to be done to get everything back on track. So the project manager decides that the team needs to charge directly at the problem so that they can overcome it; get over the hill and on to the other side.

This charge, though, is not part of the regularly scheduled project work. The project manager needs to organize it carefully so that he or she is not trying to run up a hill alone.

Outline Attack Plan
Before you can charge anywhere, you need to have an attack plan. Just as you have a plan when starting a project, you create a plan when you need to lead a charge within a project. First, identify the reason for the charge. Is the schedule running behind or has scope creep ruined your design plan? Identifying the issues is a key part of outlining the attack plan. Once you know the difficulties, then you can write a plan to correct the problems. This plan should include input …

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