We are starting a series of projects (12) and we are looking at an efficient way to name them...sufficiently appealing and easy to make reference to...
Any ideas or suggestions?
Thanks Saving Changes...
Yvonne ParleEast Victoria Park, Western Australia, Australia
Hi Paola,
You don't mention what the connection is between the series of projects. Are they all being executed with a common goal e.g. transforming existing infrastructure or in response to some external factor? Will they all be driven using the same PM Methodology, Reporting and Communications Planning?
In my experience of managing multiple concurrent projects, I have collected the following lessons learned.
1) Answer the questions above ... it will start the process of thinking of how to quickly and precisely sum up the body of work and explain it to anyone who wants to understand the WHY? as in "why are we doing this"
2) Take the outputs from 1) and think about what naming convention is now relevant .. e.g. if the projects are interconnected or interdependent then that might suggest using an overall name for the body of work and then choosing a sub-name for each project e.g. the body of work might be called Project Endurance and each sub-project might be Endurance_BCP, Endurance_Disaster Recovery etc...
3) Don't choose names which are cute ... it doesn't resonate well at Executive or Board level and you may find you spend more time talking about the cute name than about how you're going to get funded!!
4) Use the choosing of a name or series of names as an opportunity for team building ... engage with your sponsor and project team early on this one and take their input seriously! Remember this is their "brand" and they will have an emotional reaction to the name because it will be part of their identity for the duration of execution.
5) Finally, project names or brands can be good in the sense that they can be used for instant recognition, but on the other hand can be bad in that they create an exclusiveness around the project where only people who are "in the know" understand what's going on in the Cinderella project rather than being able to make an educated guess as to what the Endurance_Disaster recovery project might be about.
Hope this helps .. and best of luck with your program of work!
