Setting Goals for Project Management Success
Posted by Brad Egeland
For new project managers, as you gain skill in managing projects, your career prospects will improve as well. In general, management recognizes success and rewards it, and projects are an excellent forum for demonstrating your leadership abilities especially in organizations focused on project management with proper reporting of project progress and successes.
In addition to developing the skills required for project management, continually set career goals for yourself as a project manager. Recognize that management is watching with high expectations and will likely be reviewing your performance based on how well you achieve these goals, which may include:
Acquiring the reputation as a skilled, effective project manager
Be aware that your reputation within the company will affect your career. A positive reputation includes the element of reliability. To become a skilled project manager, practice the ideas and techniques that make the process work. To become an effective project manager, keep your goals and deadlines in mind at all times, support your team, and work well with all resources, internal and external.
Meeting deadlines, without fail
Some people accept the fact that deadlines in their companies are not taken very seriously. Don’t allow yourself to think in this way. View the deadline as an absolute. It you never miss a deadline (except in the most extreme circumstances), management will think of you as a dependable, valuable resource.
Staying within budget
The budget, like the deadline, is often seen as an outmoded practice, as an idea with little validity. This is because so few people use budgets as they are intended – as control tools for measuring the effectiveness of management’s effort. The budget defines risk and potential reward for the organization, and should be carefully monitored and controlled while the project is underway.
Dealing with Project Failure
Posted by Brad Egeland
I’ve mentioned in recent articles that the many surveys and studies are putting the project failure rate in organizations at anywhere from 51% to 75%. Given this alarmingly, but not surprisingly, high rate of project failure, it seems only fitting that we discuss how to deal with project failure. After all, when a project fails it doesn’t just happen and then you move on to the next project. There’s always an aftermath …. there are always repercussions.
Some of these potential repercussions can include (depending on the size and visibility of the failure and the reasons behind it):
- Reprimanding or termination of the project manager
- Reprimanding or termination of project team members
- Lost future business with the customer
- Bad press for the organization damaging its reputation
- Bad feedback to other current or potential customers
So how do we deal successfully and proactively with project failures? When you’re a project manager, even if you’re an incredibly skilled, successful, and lucky project manager you’re going to experience failure at some point. So we all need to know how best to deal with this impending failure both for our sake and the sake of our team members who we may end up working with again on a future project.
I can’t say I’m always successful at performing these steps and thankfully the failures have been fairly small in very infrequent, but these are the processes that I believe the project manager needs to go through in order to best deal with the project failure in terms of his customer, the project team, and his executive management…
Lessons learned session with the project team
Hold a lessons learned session internally with the project team. Let them all air their issues. Better here than in public or in front of the customer. Many may feel that the failure is the customer’s fault and that can and should be discussed, but aggravations should be aired here, not in front of the project customer or even executive management.
The Difference Between Project Success and Failure May be in Your Head
Posted by Brad Egeland
I’ve written a lot about project success factors and thoughts on why projects fail. It’s even a topic on this month’s project management surveys (go here to take part 1 and part 2 of the June PM surveys – we’ve had great turn out so far so the results will be interesting … so please participate).
Depending on your organization or your customer or even your own perception, the definition of project success or failure can be very different. Usually it’s one of three possible options:
- On time project delivery
- On budget project delivery
- Satisfied customer upon delivery
However, it can sometimes be a little gray. The fine line between project success and project failure may not be that clear.
An example of different perceptions
Case in point – I once led a project for a company where the client was a major airline. The client who was receiving the customized software implementation wanted it done in 90 days – something we had never done before in industries we were familiar with let alone in the airline industry where our software had never been implemented. A new industry meant new configurations to the software – to promise 90 days was absolutely crazy. What was Sales thinking? What was our company leadership thinking?
In the end, it wasn’t a 90 day implementation. At the 90 day mark I was onsite with a team doing everything we could to get things up and running but there were too many issues – too many things missed in the early requirements phase because we cut it short at the customer’s request based on the fact that they wanted an out of the box implementation. Yeah, right. That really wasn’t the case. Finally, about 90 days later, I finally handed off the system to them as close $38,000 over budget – most of which the customer did agree to pay.
Collaboration Within Project Management Increases Business Effectiveness: 1 in 3-Part Series
Posted by Dana Larson
It’s been proven over and over again that project management skills and systems can increase the efficiency, effectiveness and success of a business. By keeping more information organized, more projects planned and more reporting documented, work moves forward and business success increases.
But businesses can’t achieve their highest goals or their greatest successes without incorporating collaboration into their project management processes. Working together with a team is the cornerstone of all business.
Here are 3 of my favorite ways in which increased collaboration within project management aids in increasing business success.
1. Checks and Balances
2. Communication and Project Management in One Place
3. Increased Pride in Final Product
A Case for Thorough Testing and Management Oversight
Posted by Brad EgelandToday I was reading a synopsis of a fiasco that happened in the 1990s with Oxford Health Plans – a successful HMO at the time. If ever there was a case for thorough project management to be wrapped around a major system overhaul and detailed and planned testing to be utilized on a project…this one is surely it.
Here’s the story….
Oxford Health Plans is a successful health maintenance organization (HMO) in the New York area. The firm went public in 1991, and its stock price enjoyed steady growth. In 1997, however, problems with a new computer system. led to significant losses, $120 million in the fourth quarter on top of $78 million in the third quarter. When the company announced its second quarterly loss, its stock price was 75 percent lower than its previous high. It was unable to send out monthly bills for many of its customers, and the company could not track payments to hundreds of doctors and hospitals. During the year, uncollected payments from customers rose to $400 million, while Oxford’s unpaid bills to (caregivers) rose to over $650 million.
The problem began when Oxford started planning a system, based on the Oracle database management system, when it had a little over 200,000 members. By the time the system went live three years later, the HMO had 1.5 million members. The company tried to convert to the new system all at once. While the computer system labored under the load, Oxford management continued its aggressive drive to sign up new members. The new system was intolerant of errors that were accepted in the old one. As a result, an account with thousands of participants might have been rejected for an error in any member’s record.
Some customers refused to pay the HMO after not being billed for months so Oxford had to write off over $100 million in uncollectible bills. The HMO’s failure to pay its bills also angered care providers: At one point it owed Columbia University $16 million and Cornell $17 million for medical services. Oxford lost track of its actual medical costs-information a health care provider needs to set reserves and project liabilities.
While organizations have been implementing IT since the 1950s, we still seem to repeat many of the same problems. Oxford is a clear case of a management failure rather than a technology failure.
Summary
Have you ever heard of one of those projects where you ask yourself – or someone else – what were they thinking? Did they even put a project plan together? Did they even setup any test cases and perform any user acceptance testing at all? Who signed off on all of this? Or worse…have you ever heard this asked about one of your projects?!?
Solid project management practices won’t fix everything and make every project successful, but they often will and certainly will help avoid any frequent occurrence of project nightmares like the one mentioned above.
