Rather than worry about risk, lets imagine. The next question will be – how can we achieve what we have imagined? Please, if you can imagine more, add your imagination to the list.
5. Imagine!
- Imagine your projects flow ‘like a river’ to completion. Imagine projects flow like a Japanese production line – fast, effective, and no failures. More projects are reliably delivered on time.
- Imagine you, one of the resources in your company’s projects, can focus 100% on the task at hand. Once you start a task you are not interrupted by anyone until that task is complete. Will this speed up your work? Will the quality of your work improve? Will satisfaction increase as you do more good work more quickly? Will the value of your work increase?
- Imagine you, one of the company’s project managers, can always finish your projects (100% of the scope) on time, within budget. If there is a delay it is much smaller.
- Imagine your organisation helps you and your team always complete your projects on time – imagine the organisation knows the status of all projects. The clear priority is to finish all projects by their due date.
- Imagine top management can see, every day, the status of all projects – those that are doing fine, those that are OK but need watching and those few that need help to get back on track. Imagine a big TV screen that tells everyone in the organisation what the correct focus is.
- Imagine risk is almost always dealt with successfully.
...if all this would be the case, then there would be no more need for Project Managers - at least during the project.
ReplyDeleteBUT - somebody would have successfully planned everything in advance, and assumptions wouldn't have changed after project initiation.
Since fully detailed upfront planning is (too?) expensive, and assumptions do change over time, the Project Manager implements a control loop and applies necessary corrections based on inputs (progress, budget, scope, ...).
So there is an optimum: Too much planning is not suitable, but not enough planning isn't either. That's where Project Manager experience starts to come into play.
Hi Piet,
ReplyDeleteI don't think project managers will be redundant if this can be achieved, but they will be able to manage many more projects.
I agree with you that a huge amount of up front planning is way to expensive - somewhere I have posted a comment to this effect.
Where I disagree with you is PM experience. Clearly that is important, but I think, to achieve the imagination, we need to question experience. Why is it so? What can we do differently?
Rudi