New Meets Traditional: How Project Teams Benefit From More Options
Though workers are beginning to spend more time back in a traditional office environment, many still want to maintain the flexibility gained during the pandemic
Though workers are beginning to spend more time back in a traditional office environment, many still want to maintain the flexibility gained during the pandemic
Anyone who has tried to rescue a troubled project knows it can be a massive undertaking. From figuring out what went wrong to implementing solutions
Businesses have grown accustomed in recent years to the concept of remote work for employees, contractors, and other collaborators. Whether a company embraced distributed teams
Project teams want to deliver good results. They want to move their initiatives to a successful completion and provide stakeholders with the expected benefits. In
Have you encountered a project that didn’t turn out the way stakeholders thought it would? Or maybe you discovered that different groups—project team members, leadership staff, sponsors, and end users—each expected different things. Why does this happen? And what can you and your team do to avoid it?
Project managers can usually spot scope creep once it appears, but by that point the damage has already begun and it’s a challenge to get things back in line. Sometimes the hardest part of fixing a problem is knowing why it happened in the first place. That’s the case with teams that find themselves hindered by a scope that has grown out of control.
Project managers sometimes discover there are multiple versions of the truth existing within their team. One sub-group thinks it’s on track—in reality, they’re working from a schedule that’s out of date. Another department is late on several key activities, but they haven’t updated the master plan so no one else is aware of the delays that will soon affect their own scheduling. Or an outside vendor has almost completed a custom piece of equipment. Unfortunately, they don’t realize the specifications have since changed.
Finding a neutral party in a project can be extraordinarily difficult. Every project stakeholder has their own list of wants, needs, and worries. The team is focused on getting everything done on time, end users want to know they haven’t been forgotten, department managers are concerned about meeting productivity goals and avoiding work disruptions, and the leadership group is keen to leverage the project’s end results to move their own strategic plans forward. Complicating matters is that these many voices don’t just represent their own competing priorities—any time stakeholders feel they have something to lose or gain, they may not put the project’s (and the organization’s) best interests first.
Face it, there’s always the possibility that your project will encounter a problem. A key vendor may be late in delivering a key piece of equipment, or your craft labor supplier may get tied up on another job, setting your activity timeline back unexpectedly. Achieving success in spite of the challenges isn’t so much about what sort of difficulties your team encounters—it’s about how you deal with those problems. Your response will either enable you to overcome the situation and continue driving the project to a timely completion, or it will cause you to fall behind, cut back on quality, or increase expenditures as you scramble to stay on track.
The majority of today’s projects include some sort of technology component. A system may be needed to support new functions the organization will soon add, or it might be necessary to migrate from an outdated platform to one with more robust functionality as operations grow and the company’s needs expand.
When you have a project too important to fail, choose PMAlliance.
We partner with our clients to provide mission-critical project management solutions.
Corporate Headquarters
3355 Lenox Road
Suite 750
Atlanta, GA 30326
Toll-free (US): 866.808.3735
International: +1.770.938.4947
Fax: 770.234.6997
PMP, PMI, PMBOK, CAPM are registered marks of the Project Management Institute, Inc.