Wednesday, April 30, 2014

The Sensible 12: No. 1

The Sensible Project Manager provides a set of 12 Principles of Project Mangement. This is way more than Glen Alleman's 5 Immutable Principles, so...is that better or worse, or just different?
Over the coming weeks I'll comment on each of the 12, with the first now:
1. The project vision must be clear and agreed to by the stakeholders.
The first principle to success begins with understanding the vision or goal of the project. There is a reason the project was initiated and the project manager as well as all stakeholders must understand the business need and what success looks like. Make sure that all stakeholders understand and agree to the project vision.

This looks right, but the language is too fluffy to turn into action. What is a 'vision' when it comes to a project? Better that a project have a clearly defined busines value with the means of realising that value built into the project. The project must have a stated mission to achieve, and a definition of the capabilty that the project will produce.

This will flow straight into the funds that can be made available, it sets termination criteria to avoid throwing good money after bad for a project bound for failure, and allows objective acceptance when 'done' is achieved.

Vision is fine, but you'd better know what the capability of the product will be and its cost if you want to stay in business.

Then, as part of the work of the organisation, the project has got to be supported by the organisation as a whole, otherwise mission critical will be turned into mission aborted. The IRR on aborted missions is a negative number!