Never changing projects.
Comments (0) For my sins I attempt to run projects 9-5. Sometimes these go well and sometimes they don’t. I’m not sure if I score the 70% failure rate that are typical of projects (I may be higher!) but I also think it depends on a lot of things such as how to classify a failure and just as importantly how do you classify a success.
People often make the fatal assumption that any divergence of any sort from your original budgets, aim, documentation etc. is automatically a failure. The same people often fail to ask if it is realistic on a large project if it is sensible or even possible to know everything with 100% certainty of the future. Last time I checked there were only gypsies and soothsayers professing to have this level of knowledge! By this I refer to such things as markets changing, financial crashes, changes in business direction, better insight into the amount of work to be done to achieve the desired outcome, changes to the desired outcome, people factors etc. The list is endless but it is simply used to highlight that it is in my opinion categorically not possible to have the level of knowledge at the start in order to complete a project without any changes to your initial situation.
That said it should stop one from trying!
So where I am going to with this, well I just wanted to give a link through to a website where I believe they have a lot of information that can really help project managers keep structure in their work and also avoid making too many of the pitfalls that others have already made. The site is ProjectSmart. If you know another good one feel free to comment it.
