But when we go in to rescue a failing project, the techniques are little different than starting with a clean slate. In my mind a couple of issues are critical:
First, the most important way to increase your odds of success in the rescue is to get senior management agreement's that the scope of the project must be re-examined and almost certainly changed. You need this authority because failing projects have scope problems. The easiest way to free up resources, restore focus on the business value the project should deliver is to slice away the blubber surrounding the core business value. So you start by going through the scope planning process all over again. This is not popular as it unearth's problems and that's why you get authority to spend your first week or so cleaning up the scope until you have a crystal clear and measurable definition of the business value the project should deliver.
Second, with the scope defined with clarity you can start to carve away the blubber that almost always surrounds it. It's not that projects are filled with bad ideas. It's that they're burdened with good ideas that are not necessary for delivering the scope. Once we clean away the blubber we suddenly have resources we can reassign critical path tasks and maybe gain some improvement in duration.
That's always our starting point. What ideas do you folks have to contribute?
Dick billows PMP, GCa
President 4PM.com
