Project Management

Please login or join to subscribe to this thread

Avoiding project collisions

linkedin twitter facebook  
avatar
Anonymous
What's an effective way to identify project collisions among several projects within the PMO? There are several project managers and now the organization is implementing product management. I'm looking for an effective way to ensure that in-flight projects and product teams can identify points of collision when everyone is driving their assigned work forward. If a meeting, how do we structure the meeting so that it's productive and meaningful?
Sort By:
avatar
Drew Craig Sr. Agile & Product Coach| Vanguard Philadelphia, Pa, United States
A recommendation is performing a product or project delivery roadmap to help identify potential dependencies and cross-overs. Visual dependency mapping is a powerful tool.
avatar
Manish Prasad Gurgaon, Haryana, India
I would recommend following action steps to reduce collision between Delivery & Product Team:
1. Take inputs from all PM w.r.t to features they require in their Project currently not available.
2. Product Team should analyze each of those Feature identified in previous step & give weight-age & review their Product Roadmap & publish the same.
3. All PMs can refer to these Roadmap & set expectations with Client. If any feature is very critical from Client perspective than PM should proactively do bespoke development to mitigate risk.
4. Once this feature is developed by Delivery Team than code can be shared with Product Team which can than further enhance it & don't have to start from scratch. It will be win-win for both parties.
avatar
Thomas Walenta Global Project Economy Expert Hackenheim, Germany
To identify and solve project collisions, use portfolio management techniques.

First, during planning, collisions can be identified during portfolio selection (e.g. need of same bottleneck resources, deadlines for deliverables etc). The appropriate prioritization can help to avoid later conflicts, and sometimes conflicts are excepted but can be monitored later. A dependency matrix helps.

During portfolio execution, I setup bi-weekly meetings with all projects that have dependencies. Any project having a request to another project has to send that request 2 days in advance, in a form. The portfolio and types of requests are visualized on a wall with sticky pads in different colors and conflicts are communicated to everyone and can be resolved. The meeting takes 2 hours max with 10-12 people.
avatar
Kiron Bondale Retired | Mentor| Retired Welland, Ontario, Canada
As Thomas has indicated, you can start with a simple dependency matrix (e.g. Project A depends on B) and later, if each PM is developing an integrated project schedule, look at developing an overall portfolio schedule view of key dependencies.

Things to look out for are staff overallocations across multiple concurrent projects and multiple milestones (from different projects) all falling within a fairly short timeframe impacting the same groups of stakeholders.

Kiron
...
1 reply by Stéphane Parent
Jun 17, 2019 1:21 PM
Stéphane Parent
...
... and don't forget to check for operational dependencies as well. Something like year-end closing can cause you problem in getting your actual project costs from Finance.
avatar
Lonnie Pacelli Author & President| ProjectManagementAdvisor.com Bellevue, Wa, United States
Create a project impact grid which includes the project, the project manager, how you could hurt his/her project, and how his/her project could hurt you. Then set up some regular meeting cadence (weekly, biweekly, etc.) to cross review each other's project status and checkpoint on impact.
avatar
Stéphane Parent Self Employed / Semi-retired| Leader Maker Prince Edward Island, Canada
Jun 16, 2019 11:26 AM
Replying to Kiron Bondale
...
As Thomas has indicated, you can start with a simple dependency matrix (e.g. Project A depends on B) and later, if each PM is developing an integrated project schedule, look at developing an overall portfolio schedule view of key dependencies.

Things to look out for are staff overallocations across multiple concurrent projects and multiple milestones (from different projects) all falling within a fairly short timeframe impacting the same groups of stakeholders.

Kiron
... and don't forget to check for operational dependencies as well. Something like year-end closing can cause you problem in getting your actual project costs from Finance.

Please login or join to reply

Content ID:
ADVERTISEMENTS

One man can be a crucial ingredient on a team, but one man cannot make a team.

- Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

ADVERTISEMENT

Sponsors







Vendor Events

See all Vendor Events

Newsletters

Jun 3: The Career Problem Facing New PMs
May 20: Your PM Career as a Project Life Cycle
May 13: The Big Lie After Layoffs

See all newsletters