Project Management Archives - CW Training Consulting

Three Questions to Assess Your Risk of Project Cancellation

One of the biggest frustrations I’ve experienced as a program manager is seeing my project get canceled. It’s painful to have put thought, time and energy into what I believed was an important initiative for the company, only to have it be deprioritized, defunded, and scrapped. Has this ever happened to you? And how can you protect your projects from project cancellation?

Some reasons for project cancellation are out of your control. Maybe the business environment has changed, or a competitor has moved into your domain. Perhaps the project was counting on a technical breakthrough that didn’t pan out or an external partner that couldn’t follow through.

On the other hand, some of the power is in your hands. Are you running the project effectively? For example, are the goals and vision of the project clear? Do you publish and meet most of your milestones? Listen effectively to your project team and keep your stakeholders up to date with progress and challenges? Manage risks, scope creep and budget constraints?

If you’ve got a good handle on the project execution, there still may be a risk of project cancellation. This can happen if the project is not aligned well with the overall priorities of the organization or if it’s competing with other projects that are more critical to business success. To determine the risk from this internal misalignment, ask yourself these three questions.

Question 1: How does your project contribute to the strategic direction of your organization?

If there’s a list of prioritized projects, does your project appear on it, or contribute meaningfully to one that does? If you don’t have a clear idea of the strategic priorities of your organization, it’s absolutely worth your time to track it down. It may require a conversation with your manager, or the product or marketing manager in your domain. Understanding how your project contributes, and showing that tie to strategic objectives at every project review and conversation you have with stakeholders, will go a long way toward keeping your project prioritized and funded.

Question 2: What level of commitment do you have from managers of needed resources?

I once worked on a project that had a strong strategic tie to the company’s objectives of saving money in server hosting. However, no matter what I did, I couldn’t get the manager of a critical team to provide the people resources I needed to execute the project. The project soon fell apart, because no matter how strategic the work was, it could not succeed without the properly skilled people working on it. Without buy-in from the people who control your resources, your project is at risk. Get that buy-in, or raise the issue with your sponsor promptly. (You can read more about this project failure and what I learned from it in this blog article.)

Question 3: What do your stakeholders think about your project?

Declining stakeholder support is a key risk factor. Your project sponsor may still be on board with your project, but everyone else may have started to doubt the business case, or the technical foundations, or just have moved on to the next business challenge. Keep your stakeholders informed, showcase successes, highlight that strong strategic alignment, and if you notice waning interest, ask about it. Enlist your sponsor in helping uncover the reasons for the declining support. It’s better to cancel the project quickly if the project is doomed than let it drag on wasting your team members’ time, energy and enthusiasm.

Project cancellations happen. Sometimes it’s the right thing, even if it’s painful. Ask yourself these three questions regarding your projects and you’ll have a better sense of the risk of cancellation. You can either shore things up or move decisively to cancel it.

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CW Training and Consulting specializes in hands-on, interactive project management workshops - either off the shelf or customized to your needs. Contact Us and we will help you find the right learning solution for you and your business.

Project Management - 01/27/2025

Prioritize Multiple Projects with this Project Prioritization Template

If you're a project manager (by title or not), you may need to prioritize multiple projects that compete for resources. How do set project priorities? I start by using this project prioritization template to rank order projects and guide decision-making about where to use resources.

I’ve worked at Fortune 500 companies that took months to plan their next year, debating over how to prioritize multiple projects. Did those plans stick? Of course not. We would start the year in a perfect symphony of tactics aligned to strategy from the CEO’s office down to the front line managers. As time passed, recommendations of “Tiger Teams,” market shifts and project learning would result in justifiable shifts in project priorities.

I’ve also worked at startups where it felt like strategy shifted weekly, impacting project priorities along with the strategy changes. Maybe a large customer comes in with product demands or a strategy fails to bring in revenue. Pivoting is good but the cascading effect on marketing, operations and finance sends those teams into a stress ball of spin.

So where’s the middle ground for front line teams executing a shifting strategy that impacts how you prioritize multiple projects? How do you start out 2025 with a clear yet flexible plan for your projects? I do it by putting my program management skills to work.

Prioritize Your Projects

It’s common practice for Program Managers to prioritize projects with a running list of projects or initiatives for their client teams. This is useful for resource allocation and as an input to on-going assessment of projects against goals. Jenny and I carry this practice over to our partnership and any gigs we lead as program managers.

I use this Project Prioritization Template as a starting point for stack ranking projects. It's meant to be strategic, creating a framework to help decide which projects to resource and whether you’re working on the “right” stuff. The key is to relate your projects to your strategic priorities. If a project isn’t aligned to your priorities, drop it from your list.

Here’s an example of a project priorities list you might have for a marketing team: Project Prioritization Template to help prioritize multiple projects.

A Living Project Prioritization Document

Your Project Priorities List should be a living document! Of course, priorities to shift as the organization learns so I create operating mechanisms to prioritize projects on a regular basis. These aren’t in depth project reviews, but Priority Reviews. You'll want to make sure the right people participate in the review - those who can add value and can help decide whether to add, subtract, or re-prioritize projects.

Time your Priority Reviews based on the time horizon of the projects and organization culture. Marketing teams may meet more frequently as they learn from customers and the market. Product teams may meet less frequently. Make sure the review is useful!

Start 2025 Strong with Prioritized Projects

You’ll be well-positioned to start 2025 strong and achieve your goals by creating a prioritization framework that helps your prioritize multiple projects. Use it to maintain, review and adjust throughout the year. The key is to be intentional, flexible, and open to learning and adapting along the way.

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Project Management - 01/06/2025

Closing Out 2024

We love to apply project management concepts to everyday life. As we often say, “Life’s a Project!”. As we launch a new year, you might take a moment to do a "project closeout" on 2024, whether you’ve got a specific project in mind, or just general work effort, or even your personal life. How was the year? Did you accomplish what you set out to do? What did you learn along the way?

We like to borrow from the Project Closeout phase of project management for help in thinking through these questions. Maybe it can be helpful to you too!

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CW Training and Consulting specializes in hands-on, interactive project management skills boosting workshops - either off the shelf or customized to your needs. Contact Us and we will help you find the right learning solution for you and your business.

Project Management - 12/31/2024

Effective Meetings: Take Control of Unruly Meetings

Meetings are an inescapable part of modern working life, and leading effective meetings is a powerful leadership skill. Clients tell us one of the biggest meeting difficulties they have is keeping control of discussions amid challenging behaviors.

Here are some statements from some clients who shared what they want to learn to make their meetings more effective:

"Master how to tactfully and gracefully maintain (or regain) control of the meeting when one person has derailed it."
"Tools to diffuse heated discussions like disagreements on next steps, passionate points of view or tangents that derail the agenda."
"Move the meeting in the right direction without making anyone feel unheard."

Do those ring a bell? Learn to disarm difficult meeting behaviors using our three-step process that will elevate your meetings from chaotic to collaborative.

STEP ONE: Recognize nonproductive meeting behaviors

Working for years with dynamic, growing organizations, we’ve identified five archetypes that represent some of the most common difficult meeting behaviors. In fact, we get nods of recognition and sheepish raised hands when we ask who sees these archetypes in themselves.

Here are the first three archetypes. Do you recognize yourself in them? Could a change in behavior make for more effective meetings?

👉 Do you tend to hold back in meetings even when you have information or an opinion that can help? We call that archetype The Watcher.

👉 Personally, I tend to repeat or restate what others say, imagining I’m lending support or helping others to better understand. Being The Repeater might be helpful sometimes, but it can quickly get annoying.

👉 How about those who share their opinion insistently, forgetting to listen to other voices? That’s The Know-It-All.

When we see our own opportunities for improvement, we can work improving and even find compassion for others' behavior.

STEP TWO: Rein in unruly behavior with judicious meeting facilitation

Most of the survey statements above reflect a desire for high-quality facilitation skills and tools. We have facilitation guidelines that target the five archetypes.

For example, how do you regain control of the room with folks who interrupt and digress? We call this fourth archetype The Off-Tracker because they have trouble staying on topic and may dominate the conversation. We’ve got a three-part solution that works with anyone who tends to interrupt or dominate the discussion:

Interrupt with tact. “Let me stop you there” or “Hold that thought” lets you retake control with grace.
Validate using a “parking lot.” Make sure the person feels heard with phrases like “That’s a good idea” or “Interesting thought.” Then capture that idea or thought on a whiteboard or in a shared document that you return to at the end of the meeting. For each point listed on the parking lot, decide whether it's still an issue to be assigned for followup.
Redirect with your agenda. Always have a desired meeting outcome and an agenda you can point to, ideally with time allocated for each topic. With an agenda, you can say “We better get back to the topic at hand before we run out of time.” However, as a meeting facilitator, you can let the conversation continue if you think it’s important to the meeting’s desired outcomes.

STEP THREE: Leverage the strengths and talents of each meeting behavior archetype

Flip the script to elevate your meetings into high-performing collaborations. By consciously focusing on the constructive attributes of each archetype, you create opportunities for all your participants to shine.

For example, let’s take a look at The Naysayer, our final archetype. This archetype looks for the downside in an opportunity, the flaws in an argument, and the worst case in a situation. They may never show enthusiasm for an idea or offer constructive suggestions for improvement. What might be the strengths and talents of this behavior?

Consider rebranding The Naysayer as The Questioner—the one who excels at asking questions that no one else considers. Harnessing their ability to find flaws, poke holes in ideas, and identify risks and downsides can make your solutions better. They just want to make sure someone has heard and considered their concerns. They often don’t need to know how their concerns are being addressed. You might ask them to quantify a risk so you understand its likelihood - or ask for possible solutions if the risk warrants it. When asked, they can have creative and effective solutions to the issues they raise.

There you have it—a bit of our secret sauce to turn those unruly meetings into collaborative win-win sessions.

Resources to lead more effective meetings

🚩 Go more deeply into how to lead effective meetings with tools, templates and tips to manage those pesky meeting behaviors in our self-paced course, "Take Control of Unruly Meetings."

🚩 Use this free downloadable resource, The Flipside in Meetings, to help you recognize these meeting archetypical behaviors. It includes tips on how to disarm them and leverage the strength in each.

🚩 Go to our Learning Library for more articles that will help you improve your effectiveness at work.

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Effective Meetings - 11/18/2023

Project Management: 5 Principles for Project Success

Title of the article repeated in an image.

Do you find yourself managing projects when your primary role isn’t formally “project manager”? At work, it could be a new accounting system, marketing effort, or new process. At home, it could be a vacation, a group outing, or building a shed like I did recently. It was as much a project as anything I was doing at work. This is all Project Management.

Regardless of its scope or formality, your project has a higher likelihood of success if you apply these five key principles to your efforts.

Principle 1: Define What You’re Doing

Anyone who invests time or money in the project should understand the project and its scope to prevent roadblocks or disagreements down the road. I briefly define my projects in two or three sentences. For example, "My car doesn’t fit in my garage because my bicycles and tools are taking up too much space. I’m building a shed in my backyard so that I can both store my toys and park my car." I like to use "so that" in my project definitions as part of the justification. For more formal projects, I create a one-page Project Charter that includes other key information. This is something very common in project management. In fact, it's so important, we have self-paced course, walking you through it.

Principle 2: Know Your Stakeholders

In the project management world, we call anyone impacted by project outcomes “stakeholders.” Some may know they’re impacted while others may not. The latter group might catch you by surprise later with their opinions and needs, so you want to tease them out and share your project definition as early as possible.

I use a Stakeholder List to get input on stakeholders and build communication plans. Don’t forget the often-forgotten support teams like legal, finance, or customer success! The earlier you involve them the better in my experience (even if it’s a courtesy heads-up).

For my shed project, it was obvious that my spouse and the builder cared about the shed. However, did I think about potential neighbor concerns about noise or views? Would my children complain about moving their bicycles to the back? I spoke to them early to understand their concerns and get their buy-in up front.

Principle 3: Guesstimate the Timeline

Many factors go into estimating the time to complete a project (all of which are likely to change over time). The first trick is to define tasks at the broadest level that’s understandable yet not too difficult to estimate. When I feel good about the task definition and time guesstimate, I then consider dependencies by asking myself, “Are there deliverables from others that could impact my project tasks?”

In a home project like building a shed, estimating the task time may not seem like a big deal. However, it might be if you live in a stormy climate. How long will it take to order construction materials? To build the foundation and the structure? Is the contractor available if you're not building it yourself? Will you be done before the first rains?

It's become more and more acceptable not to create exact time estimates for projects. In fact, it’s often unrealistic. However, in my view, it’s worth the effort to sketch out the broadest level of tasks, guesstimate the time to complete them, and understand the dependencies at the outset. Your stakeholders will appreciate it.

Principle 4: Drive Decisions Effectively

I’ve learned that decision-making is the single most important aspect of a successful project. It’s what throws many projects off course. Keep tabs on what major decisions need to be made and who is ultimately making those project decisions.

I keep an ongoing list of open questions and decisions for my projects. Some clients use a decision-making process that includes role frameworks such as DACI (Driver/Approver/Contributor/Informed) to guide particularly complex decisions. Even if you’re not this formal, I always recommend identifying who needs to be involved and who’s making the decision. Choose a framework that fits the culture and needs of your team and decision-makers.

My shed project had many decisions and questions. I didn’t really care about the design decisions. As long as it fit in the space we allocated, my spouse was in charge of the design. However, I cared about the spend, so we both needed to approve the expenses. We agreed to this before we began.

Principle 5: Be Flexible During Execution

One of the greatest gifts of the Agile software-development movement is the idea of a flexible mindset. Unless you’re leading a project with well-known milestones and tasks, it’s highly likely that your project will evolve over time. More important than a plan that you stick to is a plan that can respond to change.

Good project managers create “operating mechanisms” to anticipate and respond to the unexpected. They’ll have a value-added check-in rhythm and real-time risk assessment tools ready to catch and manage issues.

While we had a good plan for the shed project, we ran into unexpected rocks under the surface that required different tools and effort. Yep, that took more time and labor than we had anticipated. Luckily, we built a schedule buffer and completed it before the rains!

Start Now and Learn More

Whether you write them down or just think about them, couple these five principles with excellent communication and I promise you will be on the path to project success.

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Project Excellence / Project Management - 07/10/2023

Say Goodbye to "Bunch Ball" Decision-Making

Does decision-making in your organization sometimes look like “bunch ball”—you know, when young soccer players swarm the ball, don’t pass, and don’t play positions? Debbie and I have worked with organizations large and small where too many people want to be involved in every decision.

The result, as you may have experienced, can be frustrating, painful decision-making. If you recognize any of these symptoms in your organization, you may be suffering from “bunch ball” decision-making:

Decision delay: Getting input and buy-in from everyone takes forever, possibly without a clear decision owner.
Decision swirl: Decisions are made but then revisited, sometimes more than once.
Decision tunnel vision: Decisions are made in silos, without understanding the upstream and downstream impacts.

So what’s the winning game plan? How do you help your organization outgrow “bunch ball” decision-making and become World Cup decision-makers? As with successful soccer teams, everyone has to know their position and play it well. It’s all about roles and responsibilities!

Meet the Players

Of the several decision-making frameworks we’ve seen in action, we use a Driver, Approver, Consultants, and Informed (DACI) model for its simplicity and flexibility in laying out each role’s responsibilities. (Note: This is a scalable process. You can identify roles quickly, often in your head, with no burdensome overhead.)

The Driver guides the decision-making process.
The Approver makes the final call and is accountable for the outcome.
The Consultants provide data and advice to ensure a sound decision.
The Informed are told about the decision but do not have a say.

For DACI to work, everyone must play their position. “Stay in your lane!” was what one of our clients exhorted. Beyond that general principle, here are some tips for each role in a moderate-to-complex decision.

If you’re the Driver, you make sure the decision moves forward. Engage the Approver. Cast a wide net to ensure all Consultants are identified and then ruthlessly edit down the list to only key Consultants. Get clear on how decision choices will be identified and evaluated. In complex decisions, you may also be the one to collect input from the Consultants and evaluate them for the Approver. Your efforts are critical to getting a timely, effective decision made.

If you’re the Approver, be available to the Driver to review DACI roles, discuss the context and desired outcomes of the decision, help identify evaluation criteria to be used, review the Consultants’ input, and whatever else is important for reaching a sound decision. You’re accountable for the decision and its outcome, so help the Driver help you.

If you’re a Consultant, remember that you don’t have veto power. You provide your expertise, opinion, data, or other input and trust the Approver to consider your contribution in combination with the rest of the input collected.

Informed? You’re only a spectator even if you care deeply about the outcome. When you hear the decision, you’ll want to model acceptance and responsiveness.

Sizing Your DACI

Of course, you’ll want to adapt DACI to your specific needs. Like in a simple backyard scrimmage, sometimes one person plays multiple roles. In a limited-scope decision such as a department website redesign, the Driver and Approver could be the same person. For a big, complex decision like where to relocate an office or in which market to first launch a product, there might be a lot of information to collect, many people involved, and the need for a dedicated Driver to manage the process and provide a recommendation to the Approver.

SCORE: Your Team: 1 Painful Decision-Making: 0

When the players identified in the DACI framework work effectively together, your decisions are made without delay, are revisited only with good reason, and balance all stakeholder needs. DACI for the win!

We’ve got a wealth of resources, activities, and workshops designed to help improve your organization’s decision-making. If you enjoyed these tips, sign up for our newsletter so you don’t miss a future post or learning event announcement.

CW Training and Consulting specializes in hands-on, interactive project management related skills boosting workshops - either off the shelf or customized to your needs. Contact Us and we'll help you find the right learning solution for you and your business.

Decision Making - 05/02/2023

Six Project Communication Tips for Project Success

You may have read articles on how good project communication is critical to project success. So what is good communication? Here are our best tips to help you become an expert communicator on your project. Some of them even apply in life!

1. Be clear and direct.

There’s nothing more frustrating for your listener than vague language and rambling. Know that sometimes your message may be difficult to hear, but softening the message too much doesn’t help. What helps is being clear and direct with facts, requests, and consequences. If you’re asking someone to work the weekend, make a direct request (“If you and I work this weekend, we can bring in the date. Are you able to do that?”) instead of a vague statement (“I wonder if there’s anything we can do to help bring in the date”). There’s an added benefit that you’re more likely to get a clear, direct response, too.

Stand in your stakeholders’ shoes.

Describe the project status or a newly discovered issue from more than just your perspective. Address what your stakeholders care about and what their worries might be, including relevant context, and use specific, straightforward language — not jargon. If you’re sharing the news that your project date is slipping, your manager or sponsor will want to know that you understand why it happened and how you will prevent it from happening again. The same goes for good news. Show that you understand the why.

Create a project communication plan.

Even if your project is small or doesn’t impact many people, it’s worth your time to identify whom you’ll communicate to and the communication types, channels, and frequencies you’ll use. Your core working team might meet weekly and also have a Slack channel for quick questions and updates. The rest of your stakeholders might benefit from a monthly email update that you post on your project web page, too. And if you’re new to the company or the role, it’s worth checking around for standard communication tools and processes. You may not have to reinvent the wheel!

Get to know the project sponsor’s communication style and needs.

If you have a project sponsor, take the time to learn their style and preferences for project communication. Hands-on or hands-off? Slack or phone calls? Lots of detail or just a summary and specific asks? Your project sponsor is your best ally in setting you up for success, addressing any challenges, and ensuring project follow-through, so get to know them well.

Don’t make it personal.

When there are challenges, describe what has to change through the lens of the process rather than making it personal. For example, instead of making it about you and a teammate (“Why didn’t you tell us you were running late? Did you think we didn’t need to know?”), focus on why being late is a problem, letting the process do the talking (“As a downstream partner, my team is impacted by this project, so we’d like to know as soon as you know that the project has slipped. Can you include us in your communications?”).

Find appropriate ways to use humor.

If it fits with your style, find ways to infuse a little humor into your project communications. It’ll go a long way to reducing stress, both yours and your audience’s, and makes the work environment a little more pleasant. Ask at least one other person to review your humor for appropriateness, though, and know your company’s culture so you don’t go overboard.

That’s it! Do these six tips for effective project communication consistently and your projects will run more smoothly. Here’s to great success!

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Business Communication / Project Management - 10/23/2021

Why Bother With Project Tasks?

I've worked with enough tech companies and startups to know that projects these days have to move fast and be ready to change course on a dime. While PMI (Project Management Institute) style planning is a good fit for many industries, the question "Why bother creating and estimating project tasks?" is firmly targeted at those of you who work and thrive in highly changing environments. Why not just plow through the project? Really? Might there be people (like perhaps your stakeholders) who want to know when your project will be done? Does anyone care if you're on track or not? Are there competing priorities? Is there a deadline? If the answers to these questions are "no," then kill the project. Otherwise, invest a little time to identify, estimate and manage your project tasks at the outset. Expect your first swag at tasks to be a bit fuzzy at first. You can get clarity by digging into what the tasks are and how long they might take. It's not realistic for anyone to think that you're going to be perfectly accurate. Like anything, you will refine the project as the team delves into the work.

How detailed to make Project Tasks?

How far should you break down the project work? A common rule of thumb is to break the work down to the level at which you can estimate effort. Another answer is, "it depends on your role." As a project manager, I like to get to the level at which I understand dependencies. As a team member, I break it down into more detailed "chunks of work" and create a hierarchy of tasks using an outline. I keep going until I feel like I understand what it will take to do the work. By the way, I never communicate task level detail to leadership. Leaders usually want milestones, a nice summary of the tasks being managed by the team.

How do you estimate how long tasks will take?

You have your tasks, now it's time to estimate how long they will take. I leverage past experience and projects to make my estimates - whether it's in my toolkit of experience or someone else's. I nearly always learn something new when I talk to peers and experts to help me with my estimates. One common estimating technique is called "t-shirt sizing," borrowed from Agile project management. The idea is to make your best guess at whether the effort is small, medium or large before assigning detailed estimates. I strongly suggest that you define the t-shirt sizes at the outset. For example, Small is 1-2 days worth of effort, Medium is a week and Large is unclear but at least 2 weeks. T-shirt sizing is often done by a small, knowledgeable group. Finally, don't confuse effort vs. duration. Be clear and consistent. Are your estimates for hands on time (effort) or calendar time (duration across the time available to do the work)? Project management software helps you manage both.

Are you done?

NOT YET. Identifying the project tasks and estimating the effort and duration is just the start. However, if you do this well, the rest is easy. I used a shed project as an example in earlier posts. It applies here as well. Task estimation may not seem like a big deal for building a shed. However, if you live with the potential of rain and snow it may be very important. How long will it take to order the supplies? How long will it take to build the foundation? The structure? Even the smallest of projects has many nuances and dependencies that impact how long it will take. As my partner in crime, Jenny Warila, and I say, "If you go slowly to go fast, then you will deliver higher quality with less spin in the end." The art is in the level of detail you go into as you break down the work and estimate the effort. Not too refined, but not too high level either! As they say, LIFE IS A PROJECT. Go practice!

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CW Training and Consulting specializes in hands-on, interactive project management skills boosting workshops - either off the shelf or customized to your needs. Contact Us and we will help you find the right learning solution for you and your business.

Project Management - 09/26/2018

Gaining Project Buy-in that Sticks

Welcome back to Debbie's series on the 5 key principles of project success. The first principle is having a concise project definition. The second principle is gaining project buy-in that sticks.

What is buy-in?

In the context of managing successful projects, "buy-in" is full support of the project. That support can be expressed in many ways. In its simplest form, it's a stated commitment to support the project - either through written or verbal communications. Taken further, Buy-in is expressed in the form of resource commitments of people or budget. This can be also show up in the form of prioritization. As a project leader, you ideally want support to be explicit and announced.

What drives buy-in?

The single most important factor that can help you drive buy-in is understanding and managing your stakeholders. A stakeholder is anyone who contributes to or is impacted by your project. Don't forget, stakeholders can be internal to your organization or external, such as vendors or agencies. They also may not know that they stakeholders - some are conscious of it. Others are not. Many project managers will do a formal stakeholder analysis to identify and understand their stakeholders. There are many frameworks out there, but to help you get started, ask yourself these 4 questions:

Who are the key players?
What are their views on the project…supportive, neutral, resistant?
What is their impact on the project…direct, influencer, affected?
What does success look like to them?

Once you understand your stakeholders, develop a plan to manage and communicate with them. Focus on the most influential. Those people whose opinions and support matter a lot to the project - both negatively and positively.

When are you there?

You've achieved buy-in when your key stakeholders have a good understanding of your project objectives, they agree that the project is worth the investment of organization resources, and they lend their full support to the project. Getting there is not always easy, but the first step is acknowledging that gaining buy-in is important and worth your time. Did you enjoy this article? If you enjoyed this article, LIKE, COMMENT and FOLLOW at the top of this page to be notified when I post my next article. If you missed the overview, check out my previous post, 5 Key Principles of Project Success. Next up is clear task estimation.

Find this and other free resources at cwtrainingandconsulting.com and if you enjoyed these tips, sign up for our newsletter so you don’t miss a future post or learning event announcement.

CW Training and Consulting specializes in hands-on, interactive project management skills boosting workshops - either off the shelf or customized to your needs. Contact Us and we will help you find the right learning solution for you and your business.

Project Management - 04/12/2017

Caught by Surprise by a Sure Thing: Learning from Failure

A number of years ago, while working at a large, successful software company, I took on the role of project leader for what I expected to be a fun, challenging, high-value-add technology project. My sponsors for the project were the chief technology officer and the chief information officer, and the effort was going to save the company $35M in cost avoidance. The technical challenge (untangling a root-ball of legacy web servers and upgrading or decommissioning each one) was the nut to crack, I told myself. With sponsorship from the top and an undeniably strong business case, I blithely sailed into the project.

failcreativecommons You know what's coming, right? Things didn't go as I expected. Two things saved the project from being an unmitigated disaster: first, it was cancelled while still in the early planning phase, and second, I was able to learn some very important lessons about project management, and about life. In case they might be helpful to you too, here they are.

The first sign that things weren't going to go smoothly was when my key partner, who was in another organization, didn't engage. He didn't respond to emails, he didn't return phone calls, he cancelled meetings. Then, he told me point blank that "the project isn't a priority for my team". But, but but... I sputtered in my head. Your executive is a sponsor! Of course it's a priority, because your sponsor said so! Lesson number one: Do your own stakeholder analysis, even if you think the sponsor has already smoothed the way. Get to know your key players early in the project and learn what's important to them. I might have saved us all significant grief if I had done so.

Lesson number two came swiftly on the heels of lesson number one: It's never too early to do a risk assessment. Because my initial judgment was that the technical arena was going to be the biggest challenge, I planned risk assessment after the high-level technical plan was in place. And yet, if I had taken a look at the broader project landscape and noted that partner engagement was a critical success factor, I might have done that stakeholder analysis I missed, and therefore been alerted to escalate sooner and with more success.

And speaking of escalation, my third lesson was Escalate with facts. I held back from bringing executive leadership into the conflict because I feared making my partner look bad (he wasn't following his exec's lead, after all), and making myself look unskilled (how come I can't persuade effectively?). I got hung up in the emotion of it, rather than staying neutral and simply reporting on results: emails and phone calls not returned, meetings missed.

What I didn't know at the time, even though my partner's "it's not a priority" comment should have clued me in, was that his organization was working through the growing pains of being in high demand and under-staffed. His leadership hadn't yet put in place a functional prioritization mechanism, and my project happened to be something the execs wanted but the rank-and-file couldn't deliver. Hence the fourth lesson: Keep the big picture in mind. It's not always about your project; in this case, my project and its difficulty getting traction put a spotlight on a major business process gap. From a bigger picture perspective, my project's failure was an important step in the maturation of the company; a success!

And finally, when the project was cancelled and I felt responsible and upset, I had the opportunity to learn one last lesson: Don't take it personally. Sure, there were things I could have done to have failed faster, with less wasted time and political capital, but in the end, I did my best with what I knew at the time. The sad truth is that projects don't always succeed. My project's failure did not mean I was a failure. It meant I was in there trying and learning, and isn't that what life's really all about? jumpingcreativecommons

What lessons have you learned from project failures? I'd love to hear your stories in the comments below.

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Project Management / Team Leadership - 11/17/2016

Question 1: How does your project contribute to the strategic direction of your organization?

Question 2: What level of commitment do you have from managers of needed resources?

Question 3: What do your stakeholders think about your project?

If you're a project manager (by title or not), you may need to prioritize multiple projects that compete for resources. How do set project priorities? I start by using this project prioritization template to rank order projects and guide decision-making about where to use resources.

Prioritize Your Projects

A Living Project Prioritization Document

Start 2025 Strong with Prioritized Projects

STEP ONE: Recognize nonproductive meeting behaviors

STEP TWO: Rein in unruly behavior with judicious meeting facilitation

STEP THREE: Leverage the strengths and talents of each meeting behavior archetype

Resources to lead more effective meetings

Meet the Players

Sizing Your DACI

SCORE: Your Team: 1 Painful Decision-Making: 0

How detailed to make Project Tasks?

How do you estimate how long tasks will take?

Are you done?

Find this and other free resources at cwtrainingandconsulting.com and if you enjoyed these tips, sign up for our newsletter so you don’t miss a future post or learning event announcement.

CW Training and Consulting specializes in hands-on, interactive project management skills boosting workshops - either off the shelf or customized to your needs. Contact Us and we will help you find the right learning solution for you and your business.

What is buy-in?

What drives buy-in?

When are you there?

Find this and other free resources at cwtrainingandconsulting.com and if you enjoyed these tips, sign up for our newsletter so you don’t miss a future post or learning event announcement.

CW Training and Consulting specializes in hands-on, interactive project management skills boosting workshops - either off the shelf or customized to your needs. Contact Us and we will help you find the right learning solution for you and your business.

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