Project Management Zone
Free eGuide
Why projects run late, go out of scope and over budget and what to do about it
As a consultant or manager at some point in your career you are going to have to build, manage and deliver a project.
Unfortunately whether you like it or not your next promotion, pay rise or de-motion might depend on how well you deliver that project.
Successful delivery depends on a number of elements:
- Your ability to de–bunk the myths around project delivery. Due dates, targets and gantt charts won’t help you much here!
- Your ability to get agreement on a priority rule for managing multi–project environments. Without it there will be confusion and a constant changing of priorities.
- Your ability to stop people multi–tasking. Big myth — managers believe that the higher the utilisation of their staff, the faster a project will go. Not true — high utilisation can simply mean busy people making mistakes and late projects.
- Your ability to ask the right questions about the expected due dates of deliverables. Most project managers ask about percentage complete when trying to manage a project. Did you know that you can be 99% complete and still run late? You need to ask other better questions.
- Your ability to let go of convention. You’ll be told that you must give your project task team due dates. Did you realise that using due dates will often cause student syndrome i.e. they wait till the last minute. You shouldn’t use due dates, it will make your project late.
In short, better project delivery depends on your skills and knowledge, but getting access to project skills information is timely and expensive. Until now... download our free resource today as an easy to read twelve page eBook to help you bust some myths about how to improve the throughput, content and cost of your projects. Also included is a questionnaire to help you can evaluate the effectiveness of your current projects.
The free resource includes:
- How to tell if there are comprises to project scope and budget, doing this analysis will give you an honest appraisal of how you are performing and how much you can improve.
- In multi-project environments, why you need a list and clear priority rule. This one tip might just be the ‘aha’ that massively improves your project throughput.
- Do those that carry out the tasks constantly jump from task to task? If they do then you need to stop multi-tasking. Task management is your secret weapon in the throughput war.
- How much re-work is involved both in building project networks and in project execution? You shouldn’t be re–building project networks over and over again. Find out why.
- Do you measure percent complete? If so, stop and find out what to do instead.
If you have already downloaded your free ‘5 ways to find out if your projects are effective’ eGuide and want to benefit from the whole project management systems, you can find out about it here.