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
3 comments:
Yes, I agree. We have to be able to get rid of the noise in the scope after we have revisited it. We should be careful in jumping in immediately into the project because we want to impress management. Sometimes this is our door to a more disastrous outcome.
It is very true that almost all of the projects get gain a lot of scope fat during its course for numerous reasons. A lot of times it is due to the exceeding expectations placed on the PM to do many other things apart from weilding the megaphone. Probably these are due to cost cutting measures or maybe the management does not really appreciate or understand the duties and importance of a PM to the project. Due to this fact, the PM does not end up getting the required authority to maintain the scope of the project resulting in a compromise.
So the question arises as to "how the PM can really convince the Sponsor/Management to gain this required authority". How would the PM convince the Sponsor/Management that if the driver loses focus on his job, the probability of bus reaching safely to its destination is in jeopardy.
In a real world scenario, the sponsors/management are like people that "act to stay asleep". It is very difficult or impossible to wake the people who act "sleeping". The Sponsor/Management are well aware of the causes of a project failures much ahead of time. They are well aware of the processes to be strictly followed for a successful project. But the reality is that they just close their eyes and act to be asleep finally making a scapegoat out of the PM.
So what I am trying to say is that the Sponsor/Management do not want to give the required authority to the PM. They do not want the PM to stay in absolute control of the project and its scope, which they fear could result in a political cold-war within the organization due to various positions the stakeholders hold in the organizational hirearchy.
Ramesh Sreedhar.
When there are marauding project sponsors who insist on treating the original scope as sacred text, the PM can try his rescue act by more conventional weapons such as replanning the project dates (more time), revisiting the budget (more money) and reorganizing the project team (better resources).
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