Facing Challenges at Closing Time

Even the smoothest running projects will face challenges as they move toward closeout. You know the scenario …. you and your team have faced your fair share of issues on the project – no project is without issues and rough spots.  But for the most part, things have progressed rather well.  Even user acceptance testing went off without too much of a hitch.

Now you’re almost ready for implementation, and post-deployment activities and things are becoming harder to control.  Why?  This should be the easy part, right?  I call this the ‘Steve Blass Syndrome’ of project management (after the 1960’s and 1970’s Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher who was very good and then suddenly couldn’t get the ball over the plate – ok, so maybe I’m the only one who remembers him….).  So why would things suddenly become difficult so close to the end of successful project?

Here are a few reasons why this is often the case…

Technical Challenges

• Start-up problems with new products or new designs
• Thorough identification and agreement on all remaining deliverables
• Loss of control of the charges to the project as things are winding down – people start doing ‘whatever it takes’ to get through the final push often damaging the project budget
• Hand-off issues in transition to tech support

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Is Project Cancellation Always Bad?

Having your project canceled sounds like such a horrible thing.  A career killer.  But, as strange as it may sound, this is a situation that should actually happen more often than it does.  There’s a good reason why this is true. Projects are investments that your organization makes, from which they expect a return. In real life, investments can sometimes go bad.

The same thing can certainly apply to a project. Conditions can change in such a way that the project ceases to become the winner it seemed to be at the outset. Simply stated, management no longer expect the project to have the business impact required to make it wise to keep spending money on it. In many cases, a project such as should be terminated, though in far too many cases, it isn’t.

There are at least three reasons why early project termination usually doesn’t occur, even though it should:

Plodding ahead

You should be testing project viability—or financial justification—on a continuous basis throughout the life of the project. Some organizations don’t do this very well. Others don’t do it at all. Once management approves a project, it simply moves ahead until it’s completed. In today’s fast-paced and constantly changing world, it’s always possible that there will be changes that undermine the original business case for the project. That means that you need to reconsider the economic viability of every project periodically. And the organization should terminate projects that have lost their business case underpinnings.

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Project Communication Series: PM Communication Skills

I’ve long talked about the need for the project manager to be an effective communicator.  I’ve professed that I believe it is the single most important characteristic of the project manager – their #1 skill.  If a person is not an effective communicator, I simply don’t see how they could possibly hope to make it as a project manager.

As I read further in Mr. Heerkens’ book “Project Management,” I came across his list of the communication skills of the project manager.  It’s an all-encompassing list.  It’s his list for of the abilities – in terms of communication – that all of the successful project managers have possessed that he’s come across in his career.

As Mr. Heerkens states, developing the skills needed to effectively communicate takes time, practice, and feedback.  Here is his list for those abilities he’s witnessed in successful project managers:

• Ability to express themselves effectively in conversations with organizational management
• Ability to express themselves effectively in conversations with peers and team members
• Ability to express themselves effectively in conversations with subordinates and support personnel
• Ability to speak naturally in front of a large group
• Ability to prepare and deliver formal presentations
• Ability to speak “off the cuff” effectively
• Ability to negotiate Read more »

Project Communication Series: Meaningful Meetings

On projects, meetings are usually one of the three primary methods of communication.  The other two are emails and phone calls.  Given that, conducting high-quality and efficient meetings is important not only to continued project success but also to team member productivity.  No one likes to waste time – and often on highly visible, mission-critical projects the project manager can ill afford to waste anyone’s time, let alone their own.

Gary Heerkens book entitled “Project Management” covers the concept of high-quality, effective meeting communications.  Though I don’t fully agree with all of it – specifically when he discusses how you should not have a meeting if you have nothing new to discuss, because I think it’s critical to stay on schedule and at least have a brief weekly status meeting with the team and customer even if there’s little to discuss – I still think the text is interesting and worth noting here.  Please read on for Mr. Heerken’s views on this topic…

Conducting productive meetings

Meetings can be a very effective way to conduct business. They bring people together for a relatively short amount of time so that large amounts of information can be shared. As mentioned several times previously, you should conduct core team meetings regularly to promote a steady flow of information to and from team members. But you’ll find that there are many other times when you may need to call for a meeting. Meetings are a critical form of communication.

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Project Communication Series: Project Schedule

With the project schedule being so important to tracking the overall status of the project, I can’t guarantee that this is the only article I’ll write in this series on it.  There may be more to come – so be forewarned.  It’s just that it’s such a critical part of any project whether you’re utilizing it to it’s fullest extent with all tasks, resources, hours, dollars, etc. loaded or whether you’re just entering tasks and dependencies and updating it weekly with revised % complete information.  It’s all tracking, it’s all project communication, and it’s all good.

Along with the status call and the status report, the project schedule is a form of communication that needs to happen on a regular basis every week.  Just like team meetings and customer meetings that become irregular, if you stop producing updates to the project schedule and delivering them to you team and your customer, they’ll never feel confident that they know the current status of the project.  They won’t know if what you’re delivering to them is accurate and current, from last week, or just a best guess.

This goes back to earlier things I’ve written on project management characteristics and being organized and doing what you say you’re going to do.  In the project kickoff meeting or during planning sessions on the project, you hopefully set team and customer expectations on the communication aspects of the project.  Hopefully, you even produced some semblance of a Communication Plan that documents when you’ve agreed to produce regular communication documents and hold specific meetings.  The key is to adhere to those as much as possible throughout the project.

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