Just in case you were in any doubt about how important good project management is, take a look at the lamentable mess a department of the UK government made of a recent project.

It was an IT project, merging a variety of separate systems into one. With an original budget of £55m, it was supposed to save the department £112m when complete. In fact, it is likely to cost £121m, and save £40m – a nice £81m cost to the taxpayers of the UK!

More information is available from articles in two UK newspapers, The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph.

The Telegraph article has a quote from a British politician who looked at the project:

“The Department must also overhaul its project management capabilities, closely examining the expertise of its project managers, setting up systems for subjecting future plans to rigorous challenge and, crucially, establishing incentives to officials for success and penalties for failure.”

While most errors in projects aren’t as high-profile as this, they could all cause serious problems to your organisation. With a strong project management team, methodology, and skills, along with an organisation truly bought into project management, perhaps this project could have been given a chance of success. That’s why it is important you develop your project management skills, and keep them up to scratch, with project management resources such as this project management guide!

Something a bit different today for Project Management Guide, looking at a couple of related project management blog postings out there.

Firstly, Ron Holohan at pm411.org has another great post and podcast, 5 tips to manage your manager:

I am not talking about manipulating your manager, but rather making sure you are successful in meeting her expectations. We usually know what we need to do to get our job done as a project manager, but do we know our manager’s needs? How can we insure that we are meeting her needs?

This is a very important part of what we do. We must be aware of what our manager is trying to achieve, and they are likely to be a stakeholder in our projects. Not knowing what they need to get out of your work is going to cause you a problem, just as not defining what your project needs to achieve will.

Backing this up is a post by Robert McIlree, The Most Critical P-Word Of All:

We focus primarily on what I call P-words: People, Process, Projects, Programs…and yet, there is one P-word missing; and it’s the one that trumps all of the others almost every time:

Politics.

Absolutely true. I remember one project I worked on, when I was instructed to amend a risk report because the person responsible (through inaction) for one of the high impact, high probability risk would “be embarrassed” by it! This was all due to the complicated politics going on at the time (a number of organisations were merging into one).

Politics within the project, and within the organisation, can have a major impact on your project, and it is important you are aware of it. Hopefully this will mean you are able to accurately gauge the various risks associated with it!