Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
Viewing Posts by Marian Haus
Are Your Communication Habits Good Enough?
|
By Marian Haus About 75-90 percent of a project manager’s time is spent formally or informally communicating, according to PMI’s Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (aka, PMBOK). No surprise, then, how much communication is linked to project success. PMI’s latest Pulse of the Profession report, published this month, reveals that up to a third of surveyed project managers identify inadequate or poor communication as a cause of project failure. A Towers Watson survey conducted in 2012 showed that companies emphasizing effective communication practices are 1.7 times more likely to succeed financially than their peers. So what can project managers and organizations do to improve communication and hence drive success? Here are six good habits.
How much time do you estimate you spend communicating? What best practices can you share?
|
Why Some Projects Succeed and Others Fail
|
By Marian Haus, PMP There is obviously a high interest in the project management community and literature about what drives project success. For example, searching online for “why projects succeed” will return you five times more web pages than “why projects fail.” Similarly, there are four times more pages about “project success factors” than “project failure factors.” This is no coincidence! The overwhelming interest in project success insights is driven by the struggle of many organizations and project managers to understand what drives success. But before answering the question of why projects succeed, let’s first try to define project success. The most common definition of success is delivering the project on time, on budget and in scope. PMI’s PMBOK Guide® says a project is successful if the following parameters are met: product and project quality, timeliness, budget compliance and customer satisfaction. Others define project success by measuring the project ROI (or business case) over a certain period of time. If the ROI is positive, the project is declared successful, regardless of its deviations along the way. I have my own definition: A project is successful if it meets its given goals, within acceptable variance boundaries (e.g., in terms of scope, time or budget). This is a relative definition and relies on the fact that the world is not perfect. Hence even a successful project will rarely be a 100 percent success. A civil construction project might be declared successful if it meets its scope and quality. Acceptable time or budget deviations might not be seen as failure. Similarly, an IT project might be declared successful if it meets its scope on time, with acceptable deviations from quality or budget. A project’s success is relative: it depends on how the success criteria and metrics are defined from the very beginnings of the project, along with who will measure them. OK, there are clearly many definitions of project success. Similarly, there are also many views and studies on why projects succeed. Let’s take a look at a few studies and try to find a common denominator. According to PMI’s 2015 Pulse of the Profession®: Capturing the Value of Project Management, over the last three years the number of projects meeting their goals—hence being successful—has remained steady at about two-thirds of projects. This success is the result of organizations supporting project excellence by focusing on fundamental aspects of culture, talent and process. But size matters, too. A Gartner study from 2012 shows that small IT projects (below US$350,000) are more likely to succeed than big projects (budgets over US$1 million). Other studies reveal that project success is tightly linked to clear project objectives and requirements that are fully understood and supported by actively engaged stakeholders. My view on the common denominator that leads to project success is simple: the main drivers of project success are rarely of a technical nature. Instead, the drivers are the basics of the project management culture and discipline within the project organization. In other words, fix the project management basics, and your chances of reaching project success will increase. |
The Best Way to Ensure Project Success? Understand and Control the Scope
|
By Marian Haus, PMP There are dozens of studies about project failure. (To name just three: Standish Group’s Chaos reports, PMI’s 2013 Pulse of the Profession®: The High Cost of Low Performance and Gartner’s 2012 survey on why projects fail). There are at least as many reasons why projects fail. Although in some cases forces external to a project can imperil its success, I am convinced that properly managing internal factors, particularly scope, is a key enabler for project success. This is because internal factors can be controlled, while external factors can merely be influenced. Let’s take some classic reasons projects fail and tackle their root causes from a project scope management perspective. Vague or unclear requirements and no change control—aka the never-ending scope. These are typical problems related to poor project scope management. The remedy is straightforward. Complete and clear requirements should make it to the scope; anything else poses a risk. In addition, at least a basic change management process is required to keep scope creep under control. Lack of clear roles and responsibilities (R&R). You tailor your project team around the scope work that needs to be carried out. Because of this, you have to be clear about what your project needs to deliver. This includes product specifications, product design, implementation, integration with other related product parts, validation, delivery, etc. If the lack of R&R clarity lies within your client organization or with an organization external to your project, then break down your project scope into specific deliverables and lay out the assumption and prerequisites for delivering them. For example, a product specification will have to be reviewed and signed off by the client, the client is expected to provide you with the validation benchmarks, etc. A lack of R&R often results in lack of ownership and accountability of deliverables. Underestimated timelines. This can happen especially if estimations are done based on insufficient information or when the scope is not well understood. Estimates are consequently rough, based on previous experience, approximations and assumptions. If conditions are changing during the project lifecycle, this can lead to time or budget overruns. Unclear and/or unrealistic expectations. This is often related to the project scope. Your project team might be unclear about what it is supposed to deliver or what level of quality and maturity your deliverable will have to pass to meet the acceptance criteria. In other cases, the team might be unclear on how the delivery of your project scope will impact the receiving organization. Project complexity. This relates mainly to the failure to break down a large scope into more manageable pieces and deliverables. If the list of deliverables is not clear, the sequence in which these are to be produced will not be determined. If the deliverables’ relation to each other isn’t clear, then team members will just be busy delivering something, sometime, for some level of effort. This leads to missing the project goal or ending up with time or budget overruns. A well-understood and executed scope brings you a huge step closer to finishing your project successfully. What is your experience with managing project scopes? What key factors, other than scope, do you see as enablers for project success? |
The 5 Ingredients for Getting the Best From Your Team
|
By Marian Haus, PMP What’s the most important asset of your project? Your budget? A great project management tool? Your expertise and skills? They’re all valuable, yet the most important asset is your project team! Projects are done by people, so success depends heavily on them. Imagine you have budget constraints; if you have talented and motivated people, they’ll find a way to move ahead. Imagine you have an ancient project management tool; if you have the most reliable people, you might skip tracking the standard deviation of your project tasks’ duration estimates. Imagine you’re relatively new to project management; if you have great team members, they’ll move the project ahead and drag you along till you get up to speed. Now imagine you have an unmotivated, disorganized or poorly skilled project team. Regardless of how good the other project assets are, your job as project manager will be difficult and it’s likely your project will fail. Sometimes as project managers, we neglect our most priceless asset—the project team. We focus too much on a project’s deliverables, the timeline, or making the end customer or sponsor happy. Don’t get distracted. By treating your project team like any other asset of the project, you will be acting as a project administrator. By focusing on the quality, happiness and development of your project team, you will be acting like a project leader. Here are five key ingredients for being a successful project leader and getting the best from your project team: 1) Motivation: Motivate and inspire the team by listening, mentoring, coaching, guiding and putting emphasis on people’s values. Establish a common set of values or a team credo. 2) Focus: Being busy with detailed project activities, team members might not see the forest for the trees—they might forget why the project is being done in the first place. Explain the focus by describing the end goal (the “what”). Articulate the benefits (the “why”) of achieving the project outcome. 3) Empowerment: Make your team members feel responsible for their work and accountable for the project success. It’s not just your project; it’s theirs too. Instead of assigning or delegating tasks, foster proactiveness and independence. 4) Skills Development: The daily project work should offer your team the chance to gain experience and develop expertise. Skills development during a project is a byproduct that is often neglected. 5) Appreciation: Throughout the project, take the time to appreciate and celebrate achievements. This will motivate the team and boost optimism and self-confidence, which will ultimately drive increased performance. The ability to mix these ingredients into your team mark the difference between being a project manager and a project leader. A project manager will focus on the activities to be done and will assign them to people. A project leader will focus on the team and empower and motivate its members to achieve the project goals. Are you a project administrator or project leader? How do you get the best from your team? |
How to Get Your Team to Care About Lessons Learned
Categories:
Lessons Learned
Categories: Lessons Learned
| Conducting lessons learned sessions is necessary for continuous project improvement. But not every project team or organization embraces these sessions with enthusiasm. You’ve probably heard skepticism about lessons learned sessions. Team members might say things like, “Thank God the project is over. Let’s just move on.” Or, “What we always learn from lessons learned is that we never learn from lessons learned, so do we really need to do this?” By not taking the time for learning, sharing and improving from past mistakes, organizations are condemned to repeat them. But the cycle can be broken. NASA, for example, learned from major project mistakes that had severe consequences. By establishing a knowledge management program that became part of its enterprise culture, it evolved into a learning organization. Here are seven tips for planning, organizing and conducting a lessons learned session that will engage your team and yield valuable insights. 1. Set Expectations Set the expectation early in the project that no matter how the project proceeds, the lessons learned session will be conducted at the end of each project stage or the project end. This is how you can build in lessons learned as a planned project quality measure. Everyone will become conscious that learning from good or bad experiences is an integrated—integral—part of the project. 2. Lead by Example The project manager should be the one planning, conducting and following up on the lessons learned. You should lead by example and show that the lessons learned matter. 3. Spread Optimism Before starting the lessons learned discussion, praise the team for its efforts and results throughout the project. Establish a positive attitude by encouraging the team to participate actively and constructively, with the ultimate goal of learning and getting better. 4. Keep the Session Short and Inclusive Keep the lessons learned session short: 1-2 hours, depending on the project size. Avoid monopolizing the discussions around project key players, and give everyone the chance to contribute. 5. Make Lessons Actionable Establish simple questions such as: What went well or poorly? Is it worth learning from that? How can we improve or repeat the experience? Make the lessons learned and measures actionable by assigning them to team members for follow-up and setting deadlines for concluding them. 6. Learn From the Good, Too Generally, lessons learned sessions are perceived as an opportunity for talking about the negative parts of the project. My recommendation is, balance the discussions by also talking about the good (what’s worth repeating), the bad (what’s worth improving) and the ugly (what should be definitely avoided). 7. Walk the Talk Don’t make the mistake of forgetting about the learned session. Follow up on the action items and make sure the additional learning effort was worth conducting. This will also ensure continuous project improvement through lessons learned. How do you help your team take lessons learned seriously? How does your organization embrace a project’s lessons learned—whether positive or negative—to improve its performance? |