When Italian engineer Bonanno Pisano began construction on the the Tower of Pisa in 1173 I'm sure he wasn't expecting it to start tilting—before the third story was finished. The best guess as to why the tower started to lean was that Pisano underestimated the weight of the 185-foot tower on the stone foundation of only ten feet. The weak foundation combined with the soft sand, rubble, and clay underneath the almost 16,000-ton tower contributed to the uneven settling of the white marble tower.Although the builders tried to compensate for the lean, by the time the tower was completed in 1350 it was leaning a full 4 feet, 7 inches from vertical. What's more, by the late 20th century, the tower was leaning a full 17 feet. (The tower has since undergone an intensive restoration project to keep the tower from failing completely.)
Whether you are building a 12th century bell tower or starting a new project, a firm foundation can help you achieve project success. The following are three suggestions for building a solid foundation for your next project:
- Make sure the project has a clearly defined business objective—and that everyone has a clear understanding of what it is. It's important for stakeholders and project teams to understand the business value of what they're doing. Keeping the project vision visible and accessible enables everyone involved in the project to stay focused on what's important—and helps keep scope creep to a minimum.
- Make sure the project has executive commitment to see it through. One of the quickest ways to kill a project is to pull its funding out from under it. A committed executive can also help promote the merits of the project to others within the organization to build a broader base of stakeholder support.
- Make sure there is a shared sense of determination to finish the project. If the only member of the team committed to finish the project is the project manager, it's not likely the project will ever be completed. Individual team members and executive stakeholders need to have the same determination. Without a shared sense of determination to finish, projects languish and eventually fail.
Business project management software offers both experienced and inexperienced project managers a number of valuable tools to help them establish work management best practices and methodologies. That being said, nothing can substitute for establishing a good project management foundation—or as my grandfather used to say, "Well begun is half done."
As a 12- or 13-year-old Boy Scout (many moons ago), I was on a fishing trip with my troop in a wilderness region of the Uintah mountains of Utah. Our goal was to fish the isolated high-mountain lakes for fresh rainbow trout. At the time, my father had a very nice four-piece fishing pole that I "knew" would be perfect for the trip, so I "borrowed" it. We had a great time. Until the morning I cast out into the lake and the two end pieces of my "dad's" pole shot off after my bobber and the bait.
lake and tried to follow the line to where the snag was. Within a few seconds, the freezing, snow-fed lake water took my breath and I started to struggle.
Over the past few days, I've been writing about some of the characteristics that make a great project manager. I don't think anyone disagrees that delivering projects on-time, on budget, and on spec are important. I certainly think they are. That being said, I was thumbing through some old notes last night and found these six leadership attributes. I'm not sure where I stumbled across them originally, but they are leadership skills that can take a good project manager and make them great.
"To effectively communicate, we must realize that we are all different in the way we perceive the world and use this understanding as a guide to our communication with others."
Take some time to understand your team and stakeholders. What are their key attributes? What do they care about? What bugs them? How do they communicate with their friends? When you understand the preferences and nuances of each individual on your team and the pool of stakeholders, you can look for overlap and commonalities that will help you create an effective communication strategy. This includes not only the systems you use, but your very approach to communicating with them individually. If you get this, you will be amazed at how much more effective you—and your team—can be.
New communication tools including blogs, wikis, Twitter, and other social media are making knowledge-based collaboration more spontaneous and informative. Just spend a day following the project management feeds on Twitter and you'll have access to some of the most respected experts in project management—all willing to engage in discussion and answer questions.
etrieve my messages—and, it was my secretary who gave them to me, not my voice mail.
hat said, according to Spiderman, "With great power comes great responsibility."
Organizations doing project based work focus a lot on creating repeatable processes and sustainable methodology—which is how it should be. However, what separates the good projects from the great projects is not the particular project management tools they use or the work management methodology employed—it's often the soft skills that make the difference between a successful project and a project that struggles. Yesterday, Cindi Smith posted a blog titled,
Organizations that have a continual flow of overlapping projects may already have implemented a PMO (Project Management Office), if not, you might be considering one. Because the statistics for PMO failure seem to be pretty high (I've heard as high as 50% in a casual conversation with an industry analyst) I have been thinking about what is the difference between a successful PMO implementation and one that fails.
Change is hard.
important to one senior manager may not be as important to others. This could make some managers a little nervous that their projects might not stand up to peer review.
Rear Admiral Grace Hopper of the U.S. Navy said, "No one ever managed men into battle."
Anyone who had the opportunity to watch Larry Bird play basketball during his 13 year career with the Boston Celtics can't argue with the fact that he was one of the greatest stars to every play the game. Although there may have been others more talented, there wasn't anyone who worked harder or practiced more than Larry Bird. It was Bird's dedication to the fundamentals and hard work that made him such an exceptional player.
Larry's play was never as flashy as Michael Jordan or Magic Johnson—but the guy focused on the things that were most important. "A winner is someone who recognizes his God-given talents, works his tail off to develop them into skills, and uses the skills to accomplish his goals," said Bird.
Regardless of whether or not you are a new or experienced project manager, there are some common challenges that need to be addressed in every project. Regardless of your project management methodology or whether or not you even use project management software, if you neglect the following, the odds are against the success of your project:
technology available today, there is no excuse for project teams not to communicate. The right PPM software makes team collaboration and communication easy—and online project management software tools make it possible from anywhere in the world.
In another life, I had the opportunity to contribute to a project for the U.S. Airforce. The base I was working with did landing gear maintenance for a number of aircraft from around the world. They wanted a quick and easy way to review individual landing gear parts and determine if they could be safely refurbished. Basically it was an established measuring process to ensure that after machining, the parts would still fall within specifications. After taking a number of very specific measurements to determine whether or not there was a possibility of successfully re-machining the part—if the part didn't meet pre-determined success criteria, it was scraped. The Airforce didn't want to waste time refurbishing a part that didn't offer a reasonable possibility of being usable upon completion. It was a very simple go-no-go method of measuring potential risk vs reward. Hospital emergency rooms use the same kind of triage procedure when evaluating which patients are seen first and who can wait.
I agree with Hillson when he suggests that the importance of prioritizing risk is not to obtain a precise estimate of the exact likelihood of a particular risk, but to focus on those that require urgent management, then deal with other important risks, and monitor others. A complex risk assessment isn't necessary to accomplish that. Successful project management doesn't require us to seek for more detail than what we need for this purpose.
Successful work management methodologies identify and prioritize risk, but don't necessarily dwell on whether or not a particular risk has a 10 percent, 12 percent, or even a 15 percent probability of occurring. "Even when generic scales are used," says Hillson, "people can spend a lot of time disputing between rating a risk as Low or Medium."
As covered wagons made their way along the Oregon Trail headed for the gold fields of California or the lush timber of Oregon, whenever the wagon wheels started to squeak the wagon driver knew it was time to stop and grease the squeaking wheel—before it failed. Along the trail there wasn't the equivalent of a Firestone or Goodyear to get a replacement. A failed wheel was inconvenient at best or a matter of life and death at worst.
Portfolio management best practice suggests that potential projects should be evaluated on their merits and only those that align with corporate strategic and financial goals should be pursued. However, there are still a lot of organizations that determine which projects in the queue to work on with a "first come, first served" mentality, or even worse the, "whoever screams the loudest," method.
I believe there are three things project management tools should support to make managing demand successful:
I was pleased to read in a recent Project Times article
"Wax on, right hand. Wax off, left hand. Wax on, wax off. Breath in through nose, out the mouth. Wax on, wax off. Don't forget to breathe, very important."

I was in high school when Nadia Komenich scored the first perfect 10 at the 1976 Summer Olympic Games in Montreal. As a young gymnast, her three gold medals and perfect score vaulted her to a place in Olympic, gymnastic, and sports history. Like most young high school athletes at the time, I was inspired by her performance and the obvious dedication to her sport. When she returned to the Moscow Olympics in 1980 to win two more Olympic Gold Medals, it was no surprise to anyone.
keeps projects on track, reduces costs, or enables more projects to get done.
I stumbled across Peter Taylor's book,
e the highlights and include anything that requires future action.
"The most important thing about goals is having one."
As soon as I'm given a project, if a charter has not already been defined, I like to sit down with the key stakeholders and discuss the objectives, the constraints, and the deliverables. The discussion should not be too detailed. A rule of thumb that I follow is that the charter should be high-level enough that you should never have to change it throughout the project without calling into question the validity of the project as a whole.
For any organization doing project based work, the need for leadership and collaboration is critical. Unfortuntely, for many organizations, developing leadership is a challenge—there are never enough leaders in an organization and getting people to collaborate is often a challenge.
It really doesn't matter what type of project based work you do or your particular work management methodology, project managers who spend time learning and implementing leadership skills are more successful than those that don't. As more and more organization turn to project and portfolio management best practices to make their organizations more efficient, the need for skilled project managers—those who know how to lead people as well as manage process—will continue to grow.