What We Can Do About It

Consider the Project Manager

First of all we need to consider if a project manager actually has the necessary skills to manage projects. A lot of people get thrown into project management because they are available, with no thought about what skills they need to carry out the role. I get a lot of feedback on this point so I know it is still happening today.

So a good honest appraisal should clearly identify any areas of skills shortage and development needs. But we need to be honest, not everyone can become a good project manager. Not everyone will have the right temperament or basic management skills. However, if they show promise then give them any necessary training but more importantly I think we should provide mentoring for them from an experienced (and therefore hopefully a wise) project manager.

But if they are not cut out for it, move them to somewhere else, where they can do less damage to the organisation.

Why Projects Really Fail

To recap:

The Real Cause
Earlier in this blog I listed the top ten ‘causes’ often cited for project failure and then examined them one by one. They all turn out to be just symptoms of poor project management or selecting the wrong project. But a wise project manager would also deal with the wrong project, so let's bite the bullet, the real reason projects fail is just poor project management.

Wise project managers are aware of these symptoms as they will have learned about them the hard way from their own early projects. They take the necessary steps to ensure they don’t have these problems in future on their projects. 

But that still leaves us with the problem of what to do about the unwise project managers whose project run into problems or fail altogether. The answer is not to send them all on training courses. What I believe we need to do is develop the project managers, develop the organisation, select the right projects in the first place and then regularly review them. I'll be expanding on these topics again over the next few weeks.

PMI Netherlands Summit

The summit was a great success with some fine inspirational speakers and it was good to meet so many PMI members. What was interesting was the number of common topics that were covered by the different presentations. Lots of food for thought for the future. Now I've delivered the talk I will post the remaining bits on this blog.