Just a quick one from Project Management Guide today, to point you at a great video on the ZDNet Between The Lines blog – “The top five reasons why project management fails”.

Notice how important it is to make sure the organisation as a whole is committed to project management.  Too often, appointing a project manager completes the tick-box of project management.  In reality, project management is something that must be bought into by everyone connected with the project – from your sponsor down.  You need to make sure everyone has the discipline to follow the project management steps, leading to a more successful project.

Right, we now have our project’s reason for being, its purpose in life.  We’re all ready to rush off and jump right into doing some nice, meaty work, really getting our hands dirty to move the project along.

Of course, if you do this, you’re going to waste time, money, and risk having the project fail.

Now we have the project idea, it is time to do some homework to make sure we put the project on the best footing we can, to give it as much chance of success as possible.  And because all projects are going to be done within an organisation, the first thing we need to do is make sure that our project has the right person at the top.  This person needs to be of enough stature within the organisation to make sure the project can get what it needs to get to success.  This role is known by a variety of names, such as Project Sponsor, Executive Sponsor, Project Champion, or simply Executive.

We also need to find some people to support the Executive.  While the Executive holds a position of authority in the project, they will also need help in examining the project’s progress.  To this end, there are a couple of useful roles.  Firstly, there needs to be someone who represents those delivering the project, the people doing the building, coding, writing, etc.  Secondly, there needs to be someone who represents the end users of the project, the customers, be they internal or external.

We’ll come back to all of these roles in a later post, but hopefully you’ll already be able to see why we need them, and how they fit together.

You may also want to pencil in some names to be part of your project team, but you may have to wait until you are further down the track to do this.

Oh, and naturally, there also needs to be a project manager!

All these people need to get together to help expand on the original idea that was passed to them.  This is the first chance they get to really dig down into the idea, and see how good an idea it really is.  This is the point when the business reason for doing the project needs to be clearly and explicitly set out – this will help us to nail down what we expect the outputs of the project to be, what quality these need to have, and why these outputs are a good idea.  Essentially, we want to get down:

• a business case for doing the project
• what we want the project to produce
• what quality these products need to have

In essence, we want to know why we’re doing the project, and how we’ll know when we’ve finished!  Getting this information down enables your Executive to make the decision as to whether it is a good idea to go ahead with the project or not.  Only once this information is available to them, and they have agreed to it, can we get cracking on getting the project under way.

I hope you’ve found this post in our project management guide useful – next time, we start to get our hands dirty!

(Image courtesy of The Lebers.  Some rights reserved.)