This one was a hard one for me.  I’ve thought about it for quite some time and I’ve written volumes on many of the things that likely fall under this heading.  Seven deadly sins of project management.  What I mean by this is what are the top seven things that project managers do or could do to really screw things up?  Or possibly not do … that would then, in turn, screw things up.  I’m looking for actions – or lack thereof – that can turn a good project into a bad project.



It’s not easy, is it?  There are so many things that need to be done and when they aren’t done, they can damage our project engagements.  Or things that we do or actions that we actually do take, that can really mess things up, too.  Sometimes we dip into our past (or present, but hopefully not!) or into our professional past where we witnessed someone else’s project go south, to gain this type of insight.  Either way, it makes an impression – likely because of the chaos and destruction it caused on our projects.



One way to look at it is consider what project management best practices are … and then not do them.  Or take project management best practices and really screw them up and see what happens.



Case in point: I had one project that I took over for someone near the end and we were just trying to work through some never ending ‘bugs’ to just get the system fully implemented and – more importantly to my senior management – signed off so we could get paid the final $185,000.  I went weeks without producing a status report because the type of work we were doing wasn’t your typical project process work.  I was constantly producing issues lists that would serve as our weekly status meeting discussion, but I wasn’t producing an official status report formatted all nice and pretty for the customer.  Well, it turns out they wanted one.  My mistake.  Once I found that out and started producing one (following a complaint made not to me but to my director…ouch), they were happy again and more eager to signoff even with a few remaining bugs.  You can see how easily overlooking a typical ‘best practice’ there caused me and my team some pain along the way.  Something that I really should have been more aware of since I pride myself on being strong on the customer interface and communication side of project management.



I was going to list my seven here in this intro article but I’ve decided against it in order to keep our readers on the edge of their seats.  What that really means is I might change my mind on one or two of them before I get that far….  If I have enough to say on each of the topics, there will be a full seven parts to this series plus this intro.  And keep in mind they will be in no specific order of importance – they are all important.