PMcrunch

A few weeks ago, I was having a conversation with a colleague, and I told him that “we were getting pretty close to ready” with our upgraded and substantially overahauled web site. He replied that it’s common wisdom and good practice among some of the most successful entrepreneurs to go when you’re 85% of the way there. I know exactly what he meant…and I agree. But, as usual, in practice it depends on a number of details…leading to my project Lessons Learned.

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Looking at lessons learned from the current economic crisis, one that stands out pertains to how people are incentivized in business. Banks with risky loan portfolios somewhere along the line had incentivized their people to fill their portofolios with these loans. Somewhere along the line, the incentives did not incorporate some of the risks involved. How does this play out in project and program management?

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Any project portfolio is likely to have a high degree of synergy among various projects. This is especially true of a portfolio of projects that make up a particular program. The challenge is how to best realize these synergies and to derive true value from them.

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At the end of a year and at the beginnning of a new one, we all tend to take some time to look back at the last twelve months and to look forward to the next twelve. This is a good time for us to asses our own performance, strengths, weaknesses, interests, things that we would like more of and things that we would rather do without.

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Sunk costs are exactly as the name implies: they are costs that are “sunk”. The money spent is irretrievable. It is gone, history, sunk. However, often there is either a misunderstanding or an emotional attachment to money that was spent. This is a difficulty that we, as forward looking project managers, need to remember.

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Marketing projects are important to companies, simply because they provide the opportunity to increase the top line of the business. That is, they are initiatives focused on driving revenue, as opposed to controlling costs. I have been thinking about three keys for how to lay out the requirements for such such revenue-enhancing marketing projects.

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By definition all projects must come to a close. This definitive ending to the project represents the end of the project management process, but that end also signifies a new beginning. Successful execution of the closing process within a project helps to ensure that the value of the project is realized.

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One of the challenges that many managers have is organizing the plethora of projects AND processes that are part of their organizational realm. The first step to dealing with this is to clearly distinguish what is a project and what is a process. Getting clear on gray areas can pave the way for a forceful visions and way ahead on any program.

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There are many great places for project managers to network, keep up with developments in the profession, tune in to new opportunities, and find opportunities for career growth. On a more immediate basis, networking today is also full of helpful opportunities to solve current problems with the assistance of colleagues in the profession. So, in this era of social networking, I thought I would put together a post of where some of the best project management networks can be found.

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Sometimes I wonder if we are too success oriented. In other words, we as project managers feel that we have failed if our projects fail in anyway, and we define ourselves by project success and project failure. This reminds me of children in school striving all the time to get perfect grades. The problem with this is that sometimes failures produce our greatest successes. Do we have a project management expectation that acknowledges that?

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