How To Avoid Project Failure Through Project Planning And Effective Project Recovery

There you are, project manager of a brand new project, you have done your project planning and have started implementation. Now you are thinking about what you can tell your PMI colleagues at the next chapter meeting, creating a wondrous spreadsheet to avoid project failure and revolutionize project control, and learning how to use a new whiz-bang software package you have just bought, when BAM - you are in trouble. A project wreck and you never saw it coming!

OK - so your project is in trouble and likely to become a statistic unless some immediate action is taken. No amount of wishful thinking, praying to the great god PMI, or bashing your head against the nearest brick wall can turn the clock back - so now you have to begin the project recovery process.

Common Recovery Theme

Remember the TV series M*A*S*H? Whenever they had an influx of injuries, the first thing they did was "triage," which by definition from Encarta states that it is "the process of prioritizing sick or injured people for treatment according to the seriousness of the condition or injury." In effect, they didn't rush in and try to heal the first injury they saw - they did an overall assessment of how serious each casualty was then worked on the most serious problem first, working down the priority list until everything had been treated.

In project implementation terms, there may be all sorts of things going wrong, such as being behind schedule, over budget, under resourced, or having poor quality deliverables leading to non-acceptance. So how do you recover from this imminent failure?

Preventing Project Failure

The first thing in project recovery is to evaluate the overall project - an audit or project review using a series of standard questions should identify the key problems and the severity of each one. This will allow you to prioritize project recovery planning and activity so that you tackle the most serious problems first, then work down the list. During the review, you might find some areas where you can stop the bleeding - for instance, if scope is unstable and forever changing, the introduction of a strict change control process should at least help to firm up and stabilize the scope.

The degree of planning for project recovery will vary from project to project - some projects may need a full anesthetic (stop all work) to allow an operation to be performed (redefining scope or even another round of project planning). Some may need a plaster cast to immobilize a broken part (to prevent any more changes to scope until the project is stabilized), some areas may need a bandage (some corrective measures that may restrict progress but not stop the project), some only need a sticking plaster (minor corrective measures that have minimal impact on overall progress), and some just need some TLC (smooth out minor issues).business strategy