How to Spot a Troubled Project Before the Trouble Starts

What's in this book

Read How to Spot a Troubled Project Before the Trouble Starts to learn techniques for identifying trouble projects that seem to be on track — tips and insights that could take you a lifetime to invent on your own. For example, you'll learn:

• Not only what to look for, but also how to look for what's missing — for instance, passion at the top
• What to measure, and how to get around the Hawthorne Effect when you do
• How to adjust organizational policy to limit the risk of troubled projects and get more done with the same resources
• What usually goes wrong with risk management
• How to spot project trouble by monitoring contract negotiation activity
• Special risks of projects that have external customers

People who ordered this item also ordered 52 Tips for Leaders of Project-Oriented Organizations and 52 Tips for Resuming Paused Projects.How to Spot a Troubled Project Before the Trouble Starts is packed with tips and techniques for recognizing trouble that arises from:

• Workplace politics
• Project management practice
• Organizational issues
• Interactions with external customers
• Human behavior
• Dealing with defects in deliverables

And it's all packaged in a single, compact e-booklet. At over 13,000 words, it's about the size of Who Moved My Cheese? Load it onto your Acrobat-enabled PDA or laptop and carry it with you on your next trip.

Who can benefit

How to Spot a Troubled Project Before the Trouble Starts addresses a broad readership:

• Organizational leaders who want to set organizational policy to maximize the success of all projects
• Senior managers who want to guide sponsors and leaders of project teams within their organizations
• Sponsors of projects who want better results faster
• Managers of project managers

What you do with it depends on your role in your organization. Here are just a few ideas:

Organizational leaders

Use the booklet as part of a program for enhancing your organization's sophistication with respect to project disasters. Pick and choose ideas, add your own insights, and examine organizational policy for ways to tighten project creation and management practice, and for ways to enhance and focus monitoring. Or have us customize the booklet to your organization to create training and reference materials for executives, senior managers, sponsors, auditors and project managers.

Senior managers

Whether managing a crisis or creating a risk management plan, understanding the problems and pitfalls of the project management helps you deliver a successful project or operate with enhanced predictability. By focusing your attention on the right projects, early in the unfolding of failure, you can intervene when needed and only when needed.

Sponsors of projects

Sponsors are uniquely positioned either to create disaster or to prevent it. They act as an important part of the interface between the project and and the rest of the organization, arranging for resources, championing the project, and curtailing project excesses. Finding the balance is critical, and this booklet provides essential guidance.

Managers of project managers

Managers of project managers, or leads of project management offices, can also benefit from How to Spot a Troubled Project Before the Trouble Starts. They can advise project managers about high-risk practices; advise senior managers about policy that supports risk reduction; and help devise reporting mechansms to focus monitoring and auditing activites to increase risk identification efficiency.

Some sample tips

Here are some sample tips.

Be alert when the budget for contingencies was driven down during initial negotiations

If the project manager or risk manager presented a budget for contingencies, and that budget was driven down in negotiations with the sponsor, the customer, Marketing, Sales, or management, take care. It's possible that the project manager or risk manager yielded under the weight of superior political clout. The true cost of those contingencies is probably closer to the proposed number than it is to the number that emerged from negotiations.

To limit repetitions of this sort of thing, collect data about negotiations. Let everyone know that it's OK to negotiate, and it's OK to make these adjustments, but the adjustments must be included in a Negotiation Report. That alone might deter some from using political clout to arrive at unrealistic results.

You can then create software to automatically alert internal "troubled project monitors" to flag the project, even in cases where deterrence isn't achieved.

Beware projects with a high incidence of split assignments

An individual has a split assignment when he or she is working on two or more projects, and is responsible to two or more different project leads. If this practice is widespread in your organization, it could mean that there are too many projects active at once. It could also mean that there is a shortage of people with particular skills. In either case, the projects that share people are at risk, for three reasons.

First, if trouble arises in one project, in the area covered by the split team member, the other project(s) will temporarily have to make do with a reduced level of services of the split team member. This might work out, but there is a finite chance that trouble will hit more than one of these projects simultaneously.

Second, it's unlikely that the project leads who share team members have enough schedule control or flexibility to avoid contending for the split team members simultaneously. Even if they do have such flexibility, they have to discuss and compare schedules, which takes time that many don't want to use, given the low likelihood of a good outcome.

Finally, split assignments are usually arranged so that the split person's total effort summed over all projects is 100%. But that's unrealistic. The splitting itself costs time. A good rule of thumb is 5% per project. Thus, a person shared by two projects is only 90% available.

And split assignments have subtle effects on the level of trust in the organization — they tend to erode trust. In projects where trust is very important (example: dispersed or virtual teams), this effect can create both unrecognized cost and unanticipated risk to the project.

More info on split assignments.

Be alert to financial trouble at bet-the-ranch suppliers

When a project relies on elements delivered through an outsource arrangement, and when the vendor is severely extended and in trouble, that project must be considered at risk, even if all is well in terms of schedule and budget. Project leads who do not monitor the financial health of such vendors are flying blind and without instruments.

When a project contracts with a vendor, and when that project is a stretch for that vendor, the situation calls for an elevated level of risk monitoring by the project lead and sponsor. Have the project lead set an appropriate Google Alert for the supplier, key locations for that supplier, and all key personnel of that supplier.

How to order

This item requires the Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.0 or later or Adobe Acrobat 5.0 or later. You can load it onto your computer or PDA. Or print it on any standard black-and-white or color printer. It's designed for letter paper, in two-column format, to make it easy to read on PDAs with small screens. Price: per copy. Call for volume or site license pricing at the phone number below.

This item is also available in a 10-pack (USD 150.00 per pack, or USD 15.00 per copy):

Or as a 50-pack (USD 695.00 per pack, or USD 13.90 per copy):

Or as a 100-pack (USD 1139.00 per pack, or USD 11.39 per copy):

Or as a 500-pack (USD 4695.00 per pack, or USD 9.39 per copy):