Making Good Project Decisions – Part 2

In Part 1, we discussed the first three of seven general questions that you can ask yourself and review with your team when making significant decisions on your projects.  In Part 2, we’ll continue down this path and examine four additional questions to consider as part of your overall decision-making process in your efforts to make the best possible decisions for your project, your team, and your customer.

What is the window of opportunity?

If the building is on fire, no matter how complex choosing your route of escape might be, there is only a set amount of time that your decision will matter. If you wait too long to make the decision, it will be made for you; routes will close and all options will go away eventually. The way the universe works is that big decisions don’t necessarily come with greater amounts of time to make them. Sometimes, you have to make tough strategic decisions quickly because of the limited window of opportunity you have. And sometimes, the speed of making a decision is more important than the quality of the decision itself.

Have we made this kind of decision before?

There is no shame in admitting ignorance: it generally takes courage to do so. If you’re working on anything difficult or cutting edge, there will be times when you have no idea how to do something. Don’t hide this (unless you’re choosing speed over quality for the decision in question), or let anyone else hide it. Instead, identify that you think the team, or yourself, is inexperienced with this kind of choice and might need outside help, or more time, to think through the problem. If a leader or manager admits to ignorance, she makes it OK for everyone else in the room to do the same. Suddenly, decision making for the entire team will improve dramatically because people are finally being honest.

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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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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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Project Communication Series: Planning Meeting Agenda

I wanted to use this series as examples of basically all the types of communication that can and does happen on a project.  Since I have no real vision yet of format, it can really be anything.  Specific examples, templates, etc….anything worthy of discussion as relevant and necessary communication on projects.  I still feel that effective and efficient communication is the most critical responsibility of the project manager.  If our readers on here have suggestions of things to cover as part of the communication series, please send them to me or comment on this or subsequent articles.

Below I’d like to present something I found in Carl Pritchard’s book, “The Project Management Communications Toolkit.”  It is basically a template for the project planning meeting agenda – which, as we all know – is a very critical team-to-team communication point on any project.

Here is Mr. Pritchard’s summary for this agenda….

Purpose

Project planning meetings are held, as the name implies, in order to develop all or part of the project plan. They are intended as both data gathering and data-organization sessions. They are intended to generate not only the project plan, but a consensus on that plan and its implementation. The agenda serves as a guide for how these sessions will be held.

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Project Communication Series: The Project Status Report

I’d like to go through a communication series and cover every aspect of what’s involved for effective communication on the project with the team and the customer.  Requirements may be the lifeblood of the project, but communication is the beating heart and without proper, effective, and efficient communication no project can succeed.  And that all starts with the project manager.

In the first segment, we’ll start looking at the project status report.  Because it is something that is produced weekly, contains up to date status, and drives the weekly status call with the team and customer (at least in my methodology it does!), it is one of the most critical pieces to your project management puzzle.  Skipping it or slacking on its information is really not an option.

If you share my belief that the project status report should drive the weekly status call, then all relevant project status information should be included.  In fact, look at the status report as something that you – the project manager – could produce and give to just about anyone and they could then drive the project status meeting.  This serves two purposes:

• It allows you to miss a meeting if you have an emergency or another project needs your attention
• It gives you something that you can hand to your senior leadership at any given time and say “here is the current status (within days) of ‘x’ project”

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