3 Factors That Destroy Your Projects

Project management is about managing risks, changes in deliverables and resources.

The issue with project management is that these 3 main factors impact on each other:

1. Quality
2. Time
3. People

The Impact Of Increasing Deliverables

For example increasing deliverables but delivering in the same timescale will mean that tasks will need to be done more quickly or given to more people. If tasks are completed more quickly then you may have a problem with delivering the right quality.

Giving tasks to more people runs the risk of communication between the team breaking down or becoming more time consuming. The first will increase the risk of reduced quality. The second means that your timescales increase.

The new team members need to take time to learn about the project and their task before they can begin to be productive. There is an impact on the previous team members who are still trying to provide their part of the deliverable. They need to train or assist the new members to become productive. That means their deliverable timescales are affected too. Which means the likely delivery date will slip back.

What Happens If You Move The Deadline Nearer?

As sure as night follows day your deliverables change, either in quality, or in the number of deliverables that you can deliver if you make the deliverable due sooner.

As before you can increase the number of people allocated to creating the deliverables. Then you run the same risks as before, with the impact that you may still overshoot the new deadline.

The only way to deliver sooner than originally planned is to drop parts of the original deliverable or deliverables or to reduce the quality level.

Changing People During A Project Can Be Disastrous

If you’ve come to rely on the team you’ve built up to deliver the project changing any one of them can become a major issue. And it’s the same for you if a supplier changes the person they’ve provided for you as a liaison.

If a team member is taken off the project, for whatever reason, you’ve pretty much lost all access to the knowledge they’ve built up during the project. They may be willing to give you some time, but it wont be enough and any handover is unlikely to cover areas that come up later in the project!

What To Do About Project Issues

It’s not all bad news though there are some strategies you can implement to minimise these sorts of problems. And I’ll talk about these in a later post.

And by the way if you think you don’t run projects you’re not in business you’ve a hobby!