One of the Greatest Project Management Successes of the 19th Century

The engineering feat of the transcontinental railroad is considered to surpass the building of the Erie Canal in the 1820s and the crossing of the Isthmus of Panama by by the Panama Railroad in 1855. (Two of the other great engineering triumphs of the 19th century.)

By joining the eastern and western halves of the United States, the transcontinental railroad ended most of the need for the slower, and more dangerous, stagecoach lines and wagon trains that preceded it.  On May 10, 1869, when Leland Stanford drove The Last Spike (or golden spike) that linked the country from Council Bluffs, Iowa in the east to San Francisco, California in the west, travel from coast to coast was reduced from six months or more to just one week.

The six-year-long project that included hundreds of laborers for the Central Pacific Railroad and the Union Pacific Railroad was a work management accomplishment that would challenge any project manager today, even with sophisticated project and portfolio management software. 

Whether you are working on one of the greatest engineering feats of the 19th Century or working on a project that is a little less ambitious, here are three traits successful project-based work shares:

1. The project has a clearly defined business objective—and everyone working on the project knows what it is:  It's important for stakeholders and project teams to understand the business value of what they're doing.  Keeping the project vision visible and accessible enables everyone involved in the project to stay focused on what's important—and helps keep scope creep to a minimum.
2. The executives are committed to see the project through to the end: One of the quickest ways to kill a project is to pull its funding out from under it.  A committed executive can also help promote the merits of the project to others within the organization to build a broader base of stakeholder support.
3. There is a shared sense of determination to finish the project by everyone involved on the team: If the only member of the team committed to finish the project is the project manager, it's not likely the project will ever be completed.  Individual team members and executive stakeholders need to have the same determination.  Without a shared sense of determination to finish, projects languish and eventually fail.

Business project management software offers both experienced and inexperienced project managers a number of valuable tools to help them establish work management best practices and methodologies.  However, without a framework of best practices behind it—it's like laying the hammer on the ground and expecting it to hammer the spike itself.  What are some of the best practices that you've established to ensure project success.