Susan de Sousa

Project stakeholders are a key element of any delivery. They determine direction, refine the scope and basically ensure it gets delivered. In theory that sounds wonderful. In practice it translates into something else altogether. You see the reality is that these key individuals can either make or break a delivery unless the PM has developed the necessary soft skills to successfully work with them.

The reality is that good project management resources are hard to come by. If you are fortunate enough to have more than one good resource on your project, then count yourself lucky. However this shouldn't be a surprise. After all if all the team were of the highest calibre they wouldn’t need a PM to control it all; just a glorified admin assistant!

In the good old days of the dot com boom, the project budget was something which Organisations were rarely concerned with. All that mattered was getting the product launched and moving onto the next deliverable. But times change, and have done so drastically. It is for this reason that having a good understanding of budgeting and financial accounting is becoming a more highly sought after skill in project management.

Contingency planning can seem like a total waste of time in the big picture of delivering a project. After all why bother to plan contingency for risks which might never happen? Surely a better idea would be to ensure the risks raised don't occur, and concentrate on getting the project launched.

You will often hear about the Project Risk Log and how important it is to the successful delivery of a project. Apparently this one document contains all the risks surrounding the project and enables them to be mitigated to ensure they don’t impact the delivery should they occur. Well that’s the theory anyway. The practice is of course very different.

All too many people think that simply having a long detailed project plan, an adequate budget and enough resources somehow will automatically equate to a successful delivery. If only that were the case? In fact it is estimated that over 95% of IT projects fail to deliver to either time, budget, scope or quality; a truly sobering statistic. But this begs the question, why is successful project management so difficult to achieve and deliver?

Initiating a project usually involves writing one of two documents; a Project Charter or a Project Initiation Document (PID). Now a great many things happen during initiation. High level scope is determined, deliverables set and budgets estimated.If these aren’t investigated and documented effectively it can adversely impact the entire successful delivery. But which document is better for ensuring this?

A Project Manager holds a position of great trust. Often the futures of Organisations are entrusted to them, together with large budgets which can be ill afforded. In return, transparent project reporting through Project Management Reports are expected, to emable Business Stakeholders to accurately track progress. But do Organisations always get the real picture?

If you were to ask most people what they instinctively relate project management to, the vast majority would immediately say planning. Now admittedly project management planning is a key skill which any project manager needs to have, but is it really as important to a successful project as many would like to think?

Managing a project can seem like an easy task until that is, the question of scope rears it’s ugly head. This is something which occurs with depressing frequency. There is no rational explanation for it other than that Business Stakeholders tend to suddenly become unclear on what exactly they want delivered as soon as the project starts. This all too often leads to the dreaded Scope Creep, which is one of the major reason why Projects Fail.