Perspective on where PMs & the PM function can fail in managing initiatives successfully.

1. Is Your PM Discipline
Working?
Common mistakes that lead to
unacceptable results

2. PM is all about getting the activity of a
group of people focused and organized
in order to accomplish a target
objective.
Is this what your PM function is doing?
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3. Target Objective
 Not clearly understood & well communicated
 Fully stated, measurable achievement
 PM lacks knowledge of how/what’s needed to achieve
 Can’t lead if you don’t know
 Project leader needs this (if not PM then PM assists)
 No communication & acceptance of trade-offs
 Tradeoffs will occur (unless miracle)
 Without clear acceptance objectives become corrupted
 Lack unbiased gauge for progress to objectives
 Consensus with sponsor on proper checkpoints
 Milestones based on business gauge
Well understood project target objective is first key to success
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4. Group of people
 People challenge not addressed first
 Leadership
 Change management
 Treating “Group” as having existing cohesion,
cooperation or collaboration
 Team building
 Team discipline
 Team operating culture & expectations
 Get team discipline to support vs. compete with project
 Allowing & encouraging team leadership to form
 This is not just PM, particularly on larger projects
Transition of people from loose group to operating team is PM’s first challenge
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5. Focused Activity
 People in your projects not allowed to be “focused”?
 Allocation, motivation, location, environment
 Individual/team focus not motivation supported
 Appropriate tools/means & approach to use
 Floor leadership
 Not addressing non-critical activity creep
 Meetings, training, status reports, methodology, Q&A
 Not addressing “Waiting for” distractions
 Decisions, tools, resources, input
 Not resolving competing focus among participants
 Business, technologist, methodologist, QA, PM
Without focus most projects violate “triple” constraints or fail
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6. Organized Activity
 Not ensuring cross-project “big picture”/context
 Where my work fits, who/what dependencies are
 Plan beyond/short on detail to prepare, predict & track
 Use of weekly to daily task complete planning
 Not addressing critical path and critical constraint
 What CP and constraints are, how address
 No/incomplete adjustment to the unexpected
 Key issues/risks mitigation impact on project
 Poor estimates and resource readiness
 Not resolving the unknown
 False assumptions impact on project
Keeping everyone on same page and same path is as crucial as keeping on task
COMMUNICATION is key to all of this
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7. Accomplish
 Using task activity vs. objective as progress marker
 Activity accomplishment is a management artifact, not real
success
 Objective accomplishment is real
 Not gauging objective accomplishment regularly
 Check-pointing and go/no-go gating
 Progress celebration/reinforcement
Most milestones must be built around accessing business objective progress
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8. Further information on this
Contact: Mike Batton, President, Batton Consulting Inc. | mike@battonconsult.com | 630-443-7735 (O) 630-809-2817 (M)
Contact Mike
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