As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I spent the day at SITS. I had some really interesting conversations and some truly frightening ones, so beware. We’re also working on bringing some guest posters to the Siamang blog soon. We spoke to a small company that has lots of small Read more…
Not being careful enough when negotiating supply contracts… This is so important especially in today’s day and age. I have already alluded to supply issues, but there are more, and some are surprising. Often, negotiators try to get goods and services as cheap and quickly as possible. I have been Read more…
Spending too little time at the beginning and end of a project…. from our experience there is a lot of pressure on Project Managers to “get things going”. People seem to think that deciding what you are going to do has less value than actually doing – right brain thinkers Read more…
No credible success criteria… It is important to define at the beginning of a project what the success criteria are, and to measure along the way how you are performing to meet them. There is little point in continuing to invest scarce resources only to find that the end result Read more…
Not tracking finances…. I have worked in companies who insist on tracking expenses, and others who don’t. I prefer the ones who do. Why? When you manage a project it is important to have an understanding off all of the criteria. If you don’t, you can’t measure success or failure. Read more…
Being unrealistic about timelines… Wow! This is a biggie. Often organisational behaviour creates this too, but well estimated projects are the most successful, and are based on no more than experience and common sense. There are simple ways to estimate. Use your experience to work out the likely duration, the Read more…
Not fully understanding the deadlines and the reasons behind them… This often happens in large companies, but also happens in smaller organisations. Learned organisational behaviour creates artificial deadlines and as explained earlier, where the time side of the triangle is squeezed, the other sides grow to compensate and costs go Read more…
truly knowing what the project is supposed to achieve… It might seem a strange one to start with, but it catches a lot of people out. Sometimes the person requiring a project themselves doesn’t really know or hasn’t quite got their thoughts clear. Recently, whilst working with a large mobile Read more…
I’m absolutely positive that we’ve spoken about this before, but it comes up so frequently that I’m thinking about it again. We’re working with one of our telco clients on a project similar to our normal ITSM projects but using a different technology to report directly on particular network nodes Read more…
I am currently sat on a conference call and a discussion arose around some challenges that are being faced with the project and some key barriers causing complications now. One person suggested that we raise a risk. The PM commented that it’s an issue. What’s the distinction? Simply put, an Read more…