- The frustration of never-ending projects that drag on and drag you down.
- Stops ‘risk’ from being a chore, making it your best ally for saving time and effort.
- Avoids the pain and humiliation of failure, by ensuring success.
Tips
- Use the same ‘Road Map’ or model (like the 8 Step Model from Managing Projects™) for every project so you don’t re-invent the wheel and it’s easy to pick up where you left off.
- Don’t expect your plan to be accurate about the future, you would never expect a long-term weather forecast to be precisely right. Aim for roughly right not precisely wrong.
- Get into the habit of doing ‘Risk Analysis and Management’ (covered in detail in Managing Projects™) as your best ‘weapons’ for nipping problems in the bud. It takes effort, but crisis management burns huge swathes of your time and energy.
- Manage your stakeholders, as one project manager said, “communication dies on day one, and then it gets worse after that!” You need to gain buy-in and sponsorship from day one to deliver the right outcomes, on time and on budget. Managing Projects™ covers the ‘soft skills’ as well as the ‘hard skills’ of project management.
- Document everything, make it easy to handover tasks and projects to colleagues and staff by documenting everything. Keep it simple, by using everyday common sense formats and tools like Excel and Word. Managing Projects™ equips you with a range of templates, you’ll practice them so that you understand how their effective use saves you time, helps you delegate and helps you demonstrate progress to your boss!
