Rescue Your Project BEFORE it’s in Trouble!

Nobody wants to recover a troubled project, but I must say I’ve learned a lot from the experience. Here is a set of early actions to prevent your project from ever getting into trouble.?

Confirm You have the Right Sponsor

It all starts at the top, and in the project world, that’s your sponsor.? You need to ensure your sponsor is the ‘right’ person to spearhead the project. That means they have the appropriate authority and interest to support the project’s scope. Here are key questions you can ask:

• Can he/she obtain the required resources for your project???
• Does he/she have the financial delegation to authorize spending for the project, including future increases if required??

If you can’t answer yes to both questions, it’s best you recommend that a new sponsor be found, or a sponsorship committee be formed. In a sponsorship committee, the group as a whole should have the proper authority and interest to sponsor the project.?

Ensure Your Business Stakeholders Care

Who “cares” about your project?? In addition to your sponsor, who else is invested in the successful outcomes of the project?? Do your homework to learn who these people are, understand why the project is important to them, and stay in touch with them throughout the project.? These invested stakeholders can be your advocates during tough times and help support you along the way.?

Engage Your Team

What’s in it for your team members?? Everybody wants (and needs) something to generate motivation.? As the project manager, it’s important to understand what is important to each team member. Understand what motivates them.? If you understand that, you can use that information to align project tasks with their interests and motivations.??

Align Your Team with the Project’s Purpose

As a team, do they see the value the project will bring to the business?? As project manager, it’s your job to explain the project’s benefits so the team understands how they can contribute to business success.? Throughout the project, demonstrate how the project milestones bring the project closer to closure, so the business can reap benefits.

Align Your Stakeholders

Finally, stakeholder alignment is essential.? Having stakeholders who believe in the project is great, but your stakeholders also need to be in universal agreement with the objectives of the project.? It’s important to avoid moving forward when objectives between stakeholders aren’t in synch. This is a recipe for dealing with hidden agendas, and conflicting direction from senior leaders.? Some stakeholders won’t necessarily tell you what they expect, but if you write out detailed, specific outcomes, this will avoid a lot of problems as your project progresses.? Once agreed, those objectives can be used to focus everyone on the project goals.?

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Check out Bob's latest Live session

LinkedIn Live Common and Uncommon Risk Management

This Office Hours discussion will examine the usual and not-as-usual approaches to risk management that all project managers should be embracing. Despite being a vital part of project management, risk rarely gets the attention it deserves. Join me and my fellow grizzled PM veteran Ian Sharpe as we talk about how risk management saves us, fails us, and how, sometimes we misunderstand the concept!

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Additional thoughts can be found in my project management and outsourcing classes on LinkedIn Learning, including:

• Project Management: Technical Projects
• Strategic Leadership: Deploying Intelligent Disobedience
• Outsourcing Fundamentals , the first of six courses on outsourcing. This series of courses focuses on defining services, performing service-level?management, and helping figure out what is required to support a business in an outsourcing or service provider scenario.

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This article is part of Bob’s Reflections newsletter series , which discusses project management, outsourcing, and “intelligent disobedience”, a leadership approach. If you want more of this content, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article is posted.

Want to learn more about the topics I talk about in these newsletters? Watch my courses in the LinkedIn Learning Library or check out https://intelligentdisobedience.com/

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