Page 37 - Straight Talk On Project Management IV

Is your IT project prepared for the storm?

As I write this, for a second weekend, a storm is
battering the UK.
Storm Dennis has left us all clearing up in one way or
another, flooded roads, deluged gardens, wind-battered
properties and, on social media, lots of ‘free’
trampolines!
Near us, two houses in the same street always have
beautiful hanging baskets! Whatever time of year it is,
they put the rest of us to shame. The people who live in
these houses take great pride in maintaining colourful
displays of flowers throughout the seasons. I drove past
on my way home on Friday night and noticed that one
of the houses had taken their baskets down and laid
them on the patio. This morning, I drove past again, to buy milk, and both sets of baskets were now
off their hooks and the ground. The first houses were still on the patio where they’d been laid on
Friday and the second house’s baskets were strewn all over the lawn.
Sometimes, in IT Projects, a storm blows through and disrupts your carefully laid plans. Like the
house that took their hanging baskets down, is there anything you can do to prepare and mitigate
potential damage?
Properly Define Your Project’s Objectives

Understanding what you need to get out of the project sounds really basic, but many projects still go
wrong at this stage. Knowing objectives, timeframe, scope, high-level requirements and
expectations, resources, assumptions and everything else about the project will help navigate
stormy times.

Listing your project’s objectives and scope will help you to understand the various constraints that
you are likely to meet along the way allowing you to prepare for them.

Fully Understand Your Project’s Objectives

You’ve defined the scope of your project, as outlined above, now read it thoroughly. Many projects
that fail do so because of a lack of understanding of the mission, objectives and scope. This then has
a knock-on effect to the project’s cost estimates, timeline forecast, and allocation of resources.
Understanding of the objectives and scope of the project sounds like such basic requirement, and it
is, but it also often a major stumbling block.

Prioritise Objectives

Projects are not always black and white, single objective missions. Understanding that your project
has more than one objective, and the relative value, importance and interdependence of each
objective will help you to define scope for each of them.

Often a less important objective flares up and so much time is spent dealing with it that more
important objectives are neglected.