project planning

If your organization is experiencing disproportionally higher chaos on your larger projects, you might ask if you had sufficient information and time at the beginning to understand the problem being solved before anyone committed to cost or schedule targets.

When should the team and stakeholders be brought together to assure everyone is on the same page?

Projects should have clearly defined goals, schedule targets, and resource allocations. When projects are described as “ongoing” that is often a red flag suggesting that either this isn’t a project, or it is not being well-managed.

Make sure that your change management process is clearly outlined at the beginning of a project and use it when there are unforced errors to get concessions from a vendor when the fault is clearly on their side.

Because of vendor firm expertise at blame management, clients need to be vigilant and proactive about managing systems integration efforts.

When a project manager is confused, sometimes the problem is the situation and not the PM.

A project’s sponsors are the senior managers who want the project completed and control the project’s budget and schedule. Effective sponsors support the project manager to get the job done.

Some issues/hills are important and worth going all in – but most probably aren’t. Project managers must choose their battles wisely and develop scope discipline.