We sometimes are called upon to “rescue” a failed project. While there are many reasons which can lead to a project needing to be rescued, these three are frequent offenders. You know the sad thing? They are all preventable.
In the three cases I will discuss, project failure isn’t some abstract concept known only after the fact. You see it coming, with a sense of impending doom as your project is caught in a landslide, hurtling toward a cliff. That is the common theme of these problems; you come to realize you are in trouble, but it is too late to do much of anything about it but watch.
Another common theme is how pitfalls unfold. Your project looks ok, looks ok, looks a little behind, oh no – big trouble!
1. Understimating the complexity and scope
This pitfall unfolds as your project progresses, and you continue to find little things that are needed, but were not planned. Most are minor gaps in the scope you defined, but as they occur and accumulate you get further and further behind.
At the conceptual stage, and even sometimes at the approval stage, the big outlines of the project are known and understood. But the details haven’t been established, and missing a small but critical detail can derail any project.
Before the project is approved, if possible, and at the least immediately after the project is approved, there should be a diligent scope-defining exercise. This should drill down to individual tasks and needs, and so far as possible, into the construction sequence.
Without this diligence, all the little details will get done. But they will get done when you realize the need which may be too late to keep your project on track.
With most of the little details defined up front, you can prepare for them, sequence the work, track them, and insure they don’t slow down your project. And you can focus on the few that you missed.
2. Under-staffing or otherwise under-resourcing
This pitfall goes hand-in-hand with the previous. Indeed, if you haven’t defined the scope in great detail, the more likely you are to find yourself under-resourced. This pitfall unfolds as you work to overcome one challenge, only to get behind on something else, and now that becomes a challenge.
We may have created a lean budget just to get the project approved. We may only have certain people with needed skills. We may have multiple important projects going on at the same time. We may have spent inadequate time building a detailed budget from the ground up.
If we talk about staff resources, it is almost impossible to get ahead when you are scrambling from one thing to another. And if you don’t get ahead, you will get behind. Then you are in trouble, but don’t have the time, so when you spend time on the crisis at hand, something else gets behind. It can feel like a wave at the beach is pinning you to the bottom.
If we talk about money and other resources, we can think about the project management triangle of time – cost – quality. If we start out short on money, we will consume extra time trying to “value engineer” our solution, Having not budgeted that extra time, we will get behind, and once behind, we won’t have the resource to get us back on track.
3. Responding too slow to the pending crisis
Risk. Stuff Happens. Things go wrong.
This pitfall unfolds when something fairly major goes wrong with a project. It can happen, and when it does, it can consume quite a bit of time, relative to the project timeline, to get it resolved. That puts your project behind, frequently precipitating some additional crisis.
When things go wrong, a good project manager needs to figure it out. Figure out a technical solution. Figure out what it will cost in money and time. Figure out how to get approval. Figureit out how to insert the solution into the timeline of other activities. Think about how all this “figuring out” can take days or weeks, and sometimes longer.
A great project manager knows the risks as well as they know the tasks. They know the early warning signs. They know the trigger. They know what the solution could be. They know what it will cost. They already have contingent approval, or know who to get it from quickly. They can pull the trigger to execute in minutes or hours, not days or weeks.
There is a preventive solution
The Periscope Method avoids these pitfalls. You can too:
- Create a detailed, highly granular scope and schedule early in the project.
- Load the project with resources and budget realistically, with contingency both in spending and in time. You can always back off if your project doesn’t need the attention but it takes time to ramp up if it doesn.
- Put real effort into your risk planning. Go beyond naming the risk to working out, and approving in advance, your contingency plans.
Good luck with your projects!
Ned
Please add in the comments your thoughts on other pitfalls to avoid, or your experience with these three.
