Most project teams have a standard repertoire of projects they execute on a regular basis. With a few variations here and there, your routine may consistent mostly of developing new software or retooling manufacturing processes. But companies occasionally encounter firsts—bringing their debut product to market, for example, or adding a function they haven’t supported before.
Time is an important component in every project. From scheduling sought-after craft labor resources to meeting key task deadlines, PMs must remain focused on time throughout the effort. But some projects are more time-sensitive than others. If your team is working on initiatives that require tight timeframes or have fixed completion dates, keep these helpful strategies.
One hallmark of nearly every project team is constant activity. Everyone is engaged and occupied with their tasks. They’re adjusting their workloads to ensure nothing falls behind and they maintain proactive communications across the various cross-functional sub-teams to move the project forward. But while these day-to-day efforts are an important component in success, PMs must be careful that they don’t confuse effort with the real bread and butter of project management: results.
Every project stems from an organization’s need to accomplish something—to increase production capacity, for example, or to reduce costs across a process or within a department. No matter the type of need that launched it, each effort is expected to return some kind of value back to the company.
The on-deck project. It’s there, waiting in the wings, ready to go as soon as your team wraps up its current efforts. You and your stakeholders are probably excited to get going on it. It may be a garden-variety project, or it could be a one-time, strategically important initiative that will catapult the company forward. Either way, if its start date hinges on completing other tasks, it’s in a precarious position, because if something—anything—goes wrong with your present schedule, that on-deck project will almost surely be bumped.
When multiple sub-teams and cross-functional groups are working on the same project, there is a risk of disparate project plans popping up. These are typically fractured and incomplete, and they create all sorts of trouble for PMs and the organization’s leadership. One key to project success is avoiding this proliferation of different plans and schedules, particularly when executing large, complex, or high-visibility initiatives that are strategically important to the company.
One common problem organizations encounter is the existence of multiple concurrent plans for a single project. Between the various cross-functional groups, from accounting to engineering to HR, you may discover there are too many schedules in use. With all these timetables floating around, how can you trust any of the resulting progress estimates? The true status of each activity soon becomes a big question mark. Sound familiar? It’s the “many truths” problem and it could doom your project to failure.
Every PM strives to provide the executive team with useful data. Unfortunately, it isn’t always clear what kind of information an organization’s leadership group wants. Some executives have expressed an interest in being involved at each stage of a project’s lifecycle, while others prefer to be updated on the highlights and leave the details to someone else.
It isn’t uncommon to encounter challenges during a project. Teams may lose a key member, putting additional work on everyone else, or a critical material might suddenly become unavailable. These problems are relatively routine and most PMs have the experience and resources to deal with the issues without derailing their project’s progress.
Planning and executing a facility shutdown project is a complex effort. A wide range of tasks must be carefully sequenced to ensure operations continue as long as necessary, and the rest of the organization should be shielded as much as possible from any of the closures negative downstream effects.
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