I hope you are having a great day. Today I want to share with you some tips on how to recognise the warning signs that a project is heading towards trouble:
In my experience almost every project experiences some troubles, but what is most amazing to me is that a large number of project managers do not see these troubles coming up.
Telltale symptoms act as an alert to realised risks or problems in a project. These are what the project team and the stakeholders see as manifestations of the deeper troubles that are hitting the project. The key here is for the project manager to be able to recognise whether the symptoms are sufficient enough to warrant a quick project correction or should he or her initiate a full blown project rescue or just a limited project rescue.
Most important in this is identifying the suppression factors. These are specific behaviours or events that suppress or hide the fact that is project is experiencing problems. In my view this is the reason many projects that fall into trouble are not diagnosed properly and end up in a downward spiral that leads to costly project outcomes with little or no projected benefits realised.
Here I would like to point out that one should separate symptoms from sources of troubles. A source of trouble will not necessarily derail the project. For example not having well defined business requirements could potentially be a source of future troubles, but a project team could engage users effectively to get around this problem. There are however specific telltale symptoms which serve as a radar suggesting that further details are required and that a project manager should dig deeper to decide if a project rescue is needed or not.
Lets talk about some of the tell tale symptoms. There are many but I will cover a few of them today.
One of the common tell tale symptom is Missing deadlines or worse having no deadlines. Deadlines are always going to be missed for a number of reasons. What is important here is to see if a pattern is developing. If deadlines are being missed all the time then clearly there is a problem, but if only one or two deadline have been missed then this might not require an action. If deadlines are being missed clearly some action needs to be taken.
Changing requirements is another tell tale symptom. There may be many reasons for project requirements to change, despite everyone’s best efforts. New ideas may be proposed or something that was not considered in the original plan, people changing their minds. One project I was brought in to rescue I found that the management were not clear as to what they wanted the project to achieve and as a result were constantly changing or adding new requirements, leading to massive projects cost over-runs and delays. I am sure some of you have come across this sort of thing. This can be a sign that expectations are not clear or the true decision makers have not been involved
Does this sound familiar, project is 90% completed. And you hear this week after week. This is a sure sign that something is not right. This could be because the response has been generated by imprecise qualifications on the part of the Project Manager or Project Co-ordinator, or it could be because the project team has not realised the complexity of the remaining 10%. Or it could simply be because there have been some new requirements added. Unless you dig deeper you will not know.
How many times have you heard someone say we don’t waste time doing status reports, we actually do the work! I have come across this a number of times and to me this is a very dangerous statement to make. These project reporting tools are needed not only to identifying if something is going wrong but also needed during recovery. More importantly you will not be aware of things going wrong if there are no reports generated, until it is too late to do anything about it.
Absence of management reporting tools is a sure guarantee that there are problems in field that are not being reported or communicated to the rest of the project team.
While the symptoms that I have just outlined provide a strong signal that a project is heading towards trouble or is in trouble, they should not be the focus of a rescue effort. Symptoms point to underlying problems or risks that have emerged and it is these problems. I am sure as professional project managers you are aware of the common problems or and risks encountered in different projects. These can include things such as lack of project leadership, or poor communications or lack of clarity in the objectives of the project, company politics, ignoring dependencies or incorrect assumptions been made.
I have written a report "How to Rescue Troubled Proejcts" which I am offering Gantthead members FREE!
Cindy EtohDirector of Project Services| Ropes and GrayBaldwin, Ny, United States
I am currently working on a doctoral dissertation on the "Early Identification of Troubled IT Projects." I will share my findings & conceptual framework upon completion. Saving Changes...
