How Not to Run Your First Project
Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at andy.jordan@roffensian.com. Andy’s new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.
My first project was an unmitigated disaster. It actually ended up delivering most of the scope that was expected and it wasn’t that late or that over budget, but I can’t take the credit for any of it. I didn’t have the first idea of what I was doing and I didn’t get any support from the sponsor, senior stakeholders or anyone else in the organization. There were times when the team hated me.
In my defense, I hadn’t received any training or preparation—I took over the project just as it was about to start because the person who was supposed to lead the project was asked to leave the organization immediately (because of an unrelated issue). I was dropped in at the deep end in a company that had very little experience doing projects (this was a long time ago) and had to figure out what to do with no ability to prepare.
After that first project, things slowly got better. I took some training, I learned what worked and what didn’t, and I started to understand what project management was supposed to do. Still, it took several projects before I became anything close to competent—and some of the people who worked on those projects still enjoy reminding me of my many mistakes whenever we meet up again. So, for this article I want to remember some of those mistakes and provide you with a brief list of the main things to avoid on your …
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Published at Wed, 30 May 2018 04:00:00 +0000
