While it is dangerous to use the words always and never when making a rule, here is one that, from our experience, might be an exception.
“The expected end date of a project never changes,
but the start date always slips, and often slips significantly.”
When this occurs, the project team is scrambling to make up lost time from the first day of the project. If this is your project what should you do to ensure that the coming weeks and months are not a living nightmare for the whole team? Here are six suggestions that will reduce your reliance on aspirin and antacids.
- Use strong project management techniques. Don’t be tempted to eliminate project management activities. Status reporting, risk management, change control and other project management techniques help manage stressful projects.
- Build lasting executive support. Sharing the good, bad and ugly all through the project allows you to have executive trust and support in good times and difficult times.
- Divide the project into logical segments. Not every aspect of the project needs to be in place by the due date. Deferring some activities will allow time to ensure that what needs to be in place first is of acceptable quality.
- Embrace parallel activities. Breaking the project into logical segments helps discover activities that are not dependent on each other and can, therefore, be done in parallel.
- Kill issues as soon as they are born. When problems develop quick resolution is a must. Issue management is a daily function.
- Communicate, communicate and communicate again. Some degree of misunderstanding occurs in most projects despite best efforts. To help avoid confusion and costly rework:
- Follow up often with team members to ensure everyone is on the same page.
- Don’t forget stakeholders. Keep them in the loop throughout the project to ensure they are ready when their involvement is required.
Are you managing a stressful project timeline? What techniques do you use to stay on the plus side?