Keep Stakeholders Engaged

Years ago, very shortly after I’d taken over management of a new team, there was to be a demonstration of a new set of features that my team had developed.  The demonstration was for the heads of the business areas that would be using those new features.  The software was to be imminently pushed to production, and this was the final step.  I was just about to round the corner into the demonstration room when I heard one of those VPs say, “Well, what did you do that for?  We didn’t ask for that!  That’s not going to work!”

Manage Risk

Years ago I got a call from our CIO about a project to automate budgeting for our U.S. division.  The company made consumer packaged goods, and so the budget was built up from below the SKU level, as different packaging, ingredients, and many other variables had to be taken into account to arrive at costs.  The U.S. finance folks, like in so many other organisations, used spreadsheets to do the number crunching.

Use the Plan and Keep It Alive

Failing to plan is planning to fail.  And failing to use the plan after it is developed is just as bad as no planning at all.  It never fails to surprise me when I see a project manager move into a ‘fly by the seat of their pants’ approach part way through a project, no longer using their plan.  A typical conversation might go as follows:

Me: “So where are we on the project?”

Project Manager:  “Um, good, I think…”

Me: “You think?  I don’t understand.  How are we tracking to schedule and budget?”