Is your project in crisis?

Beautiful sunny morning, you woke up in a great mood, go to work. Today you have a regular meeting on the status of the project, of which you are the leader. Are you sure you are ready for the meeting?



Below you will find a few simple questions, honest answers to which will help you understand whether everything is in order with the management in your project. I sincerely hope that these questions and recommendations will help novice managers not to be vigilant and confidently lead their projects to success.



1. Do you have a project implementation plan with task details at least up to a week?

The project implementation plan, as a minimum, should contain a schedule for completing tasks with those responsible for these tasks, as well as assessing the cost and duration of all tasks. The plan must be clear and agreed with the customer and all the executors of the plan.

2. Do you follow this plan? Check its relevance at least once a week?

3. Do you know all the tasks that need to be completed this week? Next week?

4. Do you know those who must complete the tasks planned for at least the next two weeks or are responsible for their implementation?

5. Do you have names and contacts of all of them?

6. Does the project have reserves you know about?

7. Do you know what risks may affect the implementation of the project?

8. Do you have a plan to manage these risks?

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The risk management plan, as a minimum, should contain a list of risks that you consider important for the project, with an assessment of their impact on the project. For each risk there should be a description of the actions associated with these risks that you are going to take. Actions can be aimed at reducing the likelihood of a negative risk affecting a project or, conversely, increasing the likelihood of a positive risk occurring and increasing its influence on a project. This plan must also be clear and agreed with the customer and all the executors of the plan.



9. Do you know about the problems that have arisen in the project?

10. Do you know which of the project objectives (at least those that should be implemented in the next two weeks) will be completed on time, and which ones are lagging behind? Do you know the reasons for their lag?

11. Have you planned any actions to reduce backlogs and troubleshoot problems you know? Do you implement these planned activities?

12. Do you track the forecast for the completion of the project as a whole and its phases?

If you cannot answer in the affirmative at least half of these questions to yourself, then it is highly likely to say that your project is in crisis, including because of your non-control over them.

Project crisis is a loss of controllability of it. If, answering these simple questions to yourself, you realize that you are beginning to lose control, try to determine the cause or causes of this as soon as possible and take measures to eliminate or reduce the influence of these causes.



To understand that your project in crisis is not so difficult, I will give several characteristic signs of a crisis in a project.



1. The number of unsolved problems only increases as the project progresses.

2. You do not know the reasons for the backlog in the implementation or increase in the cost of implementation of the planned tasks.

3. At meetings on project status, you only talk about achievements and hide problems and risks.



Project management is always associated with managing uncertainty, because through the implementation of the project we want to achieve what we did not achieve before, to get a result that we did not receive before or to get it in a new way for us. Therefore, no matter how well you have planned your project, there will always be problems during its implementation that you did not know about when planning.



It is important to understand the differences between problems and risks. Risks can affect the progress of the project if they happen. Problems - this is what has already happened and with what you need to work without delay.



It is also important to understand that a large number of problems and risks in itself does not indicate a crisis in a project - the more problems and risks in a project, the higher are the requirements for the qualification of the project manager and the project team. A crisis often arises as a result of late and inadequate project management, as well as a lack of qualifications for the project manager and / or project team.



Ask yourself these questions regularly and be honest with yourself when answering. If something went wrong according to the plan, do not put it in the back box, try to find out the cause or identify the problem as soon as possible, and after identifying it, plan and deal with it without delay. Do not go to yourself, information about the causes of deviations from the plan, problems and plans for their resolution should be open, because to solve some problems you will need "heavy artillery" in the person of the sponsor, curator and customer of the project.

Good luck in your projects!



Author: Oleg Tumasov, Chief Editor of Project Management magazine.