New projects are exciting. Sponsors look forward to seeing the initiative’s goals become a reality, end users hope to experience the project’s promised positive effects
Your team’s communication strategy is always evolving. Just moving from one project to the next, you’re likely to find different sets of requirements and expectations
Projects that have clear and ongoing project communication issues eventually become plagued with problems. You’ve probably seen it before: The people responsible for managing schedules
Your team may occasionally execute projects that will have unwelcome effects on an organization’s workforce. Most impacts are intended to be positive, such as workflow and machinery updates that improve safety for staff. But in other cases, employees may learn their jobs are scheduled for relocation or that their positions are being eliminated entirely.
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.
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.
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.
With numerous stakeholders to support and ambitious corporate goals to achieve, project teams sometimes fall into the trap of over-committing themselves as they try to make everyone happy. Some agree to aggressive schedules in hopes they can shave time off along the way. Others begin projects with a too-lean budget expecting they will somehow keep expenditures below normal levels. In each case, the team usually ends up looking bad in the end, as the project’s target completion date encounters delays and requests for additional funds pile up.
The need to develop new processes should be an expected part of any facility startup project. Depending on the type of site that’s being launched, the organization may not have established protocols that address any number of functions—inventory management or materials receiving, for example. Or it’s possible that formal processes do exist within the company, but that they aren’t comprehensive enough to encompass all the activities that will occur in the new facility.
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