In lots of organizations, starting fast on projects is a disease. They talk about being dynamic, aggressive and fast to market. What they're really doing is turning loose a project teams that starts work on the first few tasks with very little idea of where they are headed or how they will get there. No wonder that 80% of these projects fail. Anybody else see this going on?
Best Regards,
Dick Billows PMP, GCA
4PM.com
4 comments:
Unfortunately, yes. My team is often forced straight to work, as the PM I know that's not right but I have no other option when I have a sponsor who wants everything finished yesterday. I've tried everything to get him to let us invest a little time in planning but he won't have it.
The need to fast delivery is driving this demand. I see this happening mostly with in the satellite teams with in a large department, althought these are not always 100% successful all the time but in the short term they get on track and atleast starting of on the project and working on it is started.
One of the take home lessons from this would be to get a concise idea and togetherness of thoughts that what is driving this demand. In most cases what I've seen is that it's usually the business coming to a conclusion and asking for things to be done from the team with a quick turn around time.
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Hi Dick, Having worked in the US, Latin America and the UK I don't want to make this a nationalistic thing, but the desire to get going overiding a need to plan is a very prevalent in the US. Other countries have different problems such as inertia. I actually prefer the former..
There is no question but that there are pressures to start fast. However, if doing so makes us finish later and use more resources than we should, starting fast is a problem.
A good way to address it is in a lessons learned meeting with sponsors where we decompose a "started fast" project and calculate how much work was wasted and how much faster we could have finished.
We've done that on several occaisions and found executives who were quite surprised at the waste; most even changed their behavior.
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