December 31, 2009

Five Indicators that Your Project May be in Trouble

Posted by Brad Egeland

The post is made possible by the great people at Seavus, creators of online Project Management tools such as ProjectOffice.net, Project Viewer, and Project Planner. Please visit their site for more information.

The world of project management is not always black and white. Sometimes that’s good and sometimes that’s bad. Actually, there are some things that are cut and dried….

You’re project budget is either green or red
A milestone is either met or it isn’t
A customer either accepts a deliverable or they don’t
You either get to keep your job at the end of the engagement or you don’t

However, so many things in the PM world are not that clear. And you have to learn to look for the subtleties at times to gauge certain things about your project, your customer’s satisfaction level, your team’s focus, etc. New project managers won’t be there yet. Experienced project managers learn – over time – to look for certain indicators that will help tell them how things are going, how the project is being perceived, and if there are some corrective or evasive actions they may need to be taking.

Here are some signs I’ve observed in the course of my career in project management that usually will raise a red flag:

Executive management has a sudden interest in your project. This one could be good or bad – but it’s usually bad. The project may have taken on a higher level of visibility within the organization due to many reasons or factors. However, it’s also very likely that your customer is troubled by something and has contacted someone higher up resulting in this new interest. This indicates both that your customer has a concern and that they went around you as the PM and discussed it with executive management without your knowledge. Not a good sign.
New staff has been added to your project without you requesting them. When management starts to add staff to your project – look out. They are likely putting someone senior on the project to baby-sit it and the PM. I’ve seen it happen to project managers on projects. Somehow, along the way, confidence in the PM has diminished. It may be because of something the customer said or because of activities that have been observed, but it’s not usually a good sign. Requests for resources should always come from the project manager.
Your PMO director has started dialing in to your customer status calls. A sudden interest in your project from the PMO director when they were hands-off before may be a bad indicator. Again, it may mean the customer has gone around the PM and complained about something, but for whatever reason the PMO director is indirectly expressing concern about the project status.
Accounting is asking you about unpaid customer invoices related to your project. This one is bad because it means that, for whatever reason, your customer has become slow in paying their bills. It’s up to the project manager to engage the customer in a discussion about the outstanding invoices and possible discuss overall satisfaction. Only two things will slow a customer down in paying their bills and both are bad – customer cash flow issues and customer satisfaction issues.
The customer has been less communicative / more distant. If the customer has been less involved, less communicative, slower in making decisions or you’re just sensing a lack of commitment to the project on the part of the customer, it may be a bad sign. What it can mean is that the project has lost priority on the customer side. Or that it has lost funding. Or that the customer team is about to be re-assigned elsewhere. No matter what the cause, it’s not a good sign because it may mean the project is going to be slowed way down or that it is going to be canceled completely. It’s a good sign that you should contact the customer project team lead and have a serious discussion about the project direction and customer commitment to finishing the project.