administrative nightmare.
The paperwork involved
will not endear you to your
team, either!
Failure to Involve Task
Performers in Planning.
This mistake has been
mentioned a couple of
times already, but it’s
worth repeating. The prin-
ciple is simple: the people
who will be working on
your project should be
heavily involved in plan-
ning their portion of it. There are at least two good reasons for
this. First, the planning outputs will undoubtedly be more accu-
rate as the task performers are probably more knowledgeable
than you—after all, it’s what they do. Second, involving them
during the planning stage is likely to make them significantly
more willing to participate and more committed to succeeding.
People often feel compelled to live up to what they’ve promised.
Failure to Reflect Risk and Uncertainty in Plans. Chapter 8 is
entirely dedicated to the subjects of risk and uncertainty. Why?
Because it’s a very big deal. Nearly all projects that go awry do
so because risk and uncertainty were left untreated. Risk man-
agement techniques use statistics and other scientific methods
to allow you to make the most reasonable prediction of an out-
come in conditions of high uncertainty. Yet many who plan
projects do not properly assess, accommodate, or plan for the
inherent risk in projects. There are at least three reasons why
this happens:
- Project managers don’t understand risk management.
Although risk management techniques have been avail-
able for quite some time, many project managers still
don’t know how to properly deal with risk, so they
104 Project Management
Synchronization
Is the Key
The frequency of your team
meetings and the size of the work
elements on your schedule should be
approximately proportionate.This
provides a reasonable balance
between your need to maintain con-
trol and the amount of effort
required to create and maintain your
schedule.The 4% rule of thumb pro-
vides a good guideline for scheduling
meetings as well as for sizing work
elements.