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Project Sponsor's Cheat Sheet
Use the Cheat Sheet to identify your greatest pain within your project. Take inspiration from the explanations of the underlying structures, and introduce alternative structures that are known to drive the right behavior.
There is no single root cause leading to challenged complex projects. There are always many competing causes of death, and a complete analysis is needed to establish a full overview.
In lack of time for the analysis, or as a quick first shot, I have compiled this Cheat Sheet based on what problems a significant amount of executives have expressed.
The fee will give you access to:
A Cheat Sheet for each problem that includes:
WHY: A generic analysis of the underlying structures
LOOK FOR: Signs, that support your hypothesis
LEADING PRINCIPLES: How you can drive the right behavior
ASK FOR: Practical KPIs and actions for your management team
2-hour online review of your conclusion.
Based on this, you can present a few decisive actions at the next steering group meeting with confidence.
Please recognize that the cheat sheet simplifies a much more complex underlying structure in which each structural element chaotically affects the others.
Please appreciate that the simplifications in the cheat sheet are intended to help you select a vital few actions fast and with a high probability of success.
Browse the list below for symptoms that you recognize.
Cost and schedule estimates are unacceptable for the stakeholders.
Beware; you are facing a situation where your decisions has the greatest impact. You are about to navigate in the void between the political reality and the engineering reality, where different cost expectations collide with different time perspectives. Quite a communication challenge!
Call in the undertaker! If a complex project skips QA activities, it is on the beaten track for disaster.
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For complex projects, you need employees who take action immediately when they face an issue. Unfortunately, they also take action if they cannot perform according to their own expectations in their current role and leave.
This is a serious warning signal. In a simple project, time and cost spent may act as a proxy for progress, to the extent that there is a linear relation. But absolutely not in a complex project, which means that if that is the only progress measure you have, you travel blindfolded.
This project governance symptom is the equivalent of going to the doctor with a high fever as the only symptom. Unfortunately, the project steering group's actions often resemble sending the patient home with a more precise thermometer and asking him to measure more often.
Financial controls are attractive because they are very tangible, accurate, and relevant in a simple world as governance controls. If lack of financial control is a problem, first, you need to evaluate whether it is reasonable to expect to have financial control in the way your governance structures assume is possible.
Simple projects miss deadlines due to poor estimation of the planned tasks, while complex projects miss deadlines due to unforeseen tasks. Your actions depend heavily on the mix of simple and complex tasks.
The lack of resources is constant; we can always use more. But adding resources does not help!
