People are the Problem?

The employees within your company either help it to prosper or impede its effectiveness. Because employees at all levels of the organization make decisions that could effect your project, we as project managers need to be aware if these workers are motivated, properly placed, supported by senior management, and well trained.

A good question to ponder before starting work on that new project is: will your project team be staffed with the right people, having the right set of skills, doing the right things, at the right time, in the right place?

Also, are your project team members motivated and committed to doing a good job, and are they supportive of the company's goals, mission, and values? Do they have the support of their management? Is there a senior management representative assigned to your project that will act as Project Sponsor and be held responsible for the success of the project?

If not, STOP YOUR PROJECT!

Refuse to work on or manage a project that doesn't have motivated, skilled, properly trained team members. Better to kill a project (or recommend one to be killed) than to be the one that hears the words "You're Fired" when the project fails.

Good Website

In case you haven't heard the Ten Step website has some excellent free project management white papers and templates, and additionally they license (for a fee) a number of Project Management Methodologies (TenStep, PMOStep, SupportStep, etc). The prices are reasonable, and I personally have licenses for the TenStep and PMOStep methodologies and can highly recommend these for new or experienced project managers.

I have no affiliation with this site, but use the content and have found it to be an excellent source of project management information. If you visit the site let Tom Mochal (President of TenStep) know I sent you.

Tom has just recently written a book entitled Lessons in Project Management, and from what I understand it has received rave reviews. I will be purchasing a copy for myself within the next few weeks.

Until next time...

What Makes a Successful Project?

The four measurements that must always be used are:

1.) The customer is satisfied

2.) The project is delivered within or under budget

3.) The project is completed on time

4.) The project's requirements have been met

Keep in mind the most important measure of project success is Customer Satisfaction. If you deliver a project on-time, within budget and it meets all requirements yet the customer is not satisfied, the project is a FAILURE!

Keep your customers (stakeholders/sponsor) informed throughout the project. Communicate to your customers using face-to-face conversations (yes, good project managers actually do this), status reports, e-mail, status meetings, voice mail, formal documentation, even sky writing if you have to. Your customers must be kept informed and remain engaged throughout the project. If you aren't hearing from them during your project, you aren't communicating with them. We all know that effective communications are two-way. If members of your project team choose not to communicate with you during your project look to have them removed from the team immediately.

In closing, maintaining a dialogue with your customers throughout your project helps you to address concerns and issues quickly. Combining effective communications and management of the project's triple constraints (Time, Cost Quality/Requirements) will help to ensure that your customers are satisfied with the end result of the project.