By Yolandi Nortje, executive of Intuate Group

JOHANNESBURG– Projects often involve a lot of time and money, making it essential to minimise risks, attempt to avoid the common project hazards and maximise returns.  Unfortunately, even when selecting a seasoned project management partner, there are still a number of pitfalls to be avoided.

We believe that the top most common project pitfalls are:

  1. Lack of communication, including progress reporting;
  2. Unclear project objectives;
  3. Failure to adequately identify, document and track requirements; and
  4. Failure to set and manage expectations.

Lack of communication

Once a project is in full swing, a common issue is communication. Most project teams use e-mail to communicate updates about their projects and tasks. The problem here is that project communication resides in each individual’s inbox. So, if a new resource joins the project, there is no centralised view of the project history.  Similarly, should a team member hit “reply”, rather than “reply all”, then valuable communication may not be properly dispersed.

At a bare minimum, all project and task communication should be posted in a centralised location, so that any and all resources have full visibility, whilst a new team member can get up to speed rapidly by reviewing the entire project history.

Unclear project objectives

Most organisations have more opportunities and project initiatives than they can ever hope to fulfil, and many initiate more than they probably should.  If executive management is not clear on project priorities, then it follows that the entire organisation will be unclear about which projects are the most important.  It is the role of executive management to determine the organisation’s long term goals and the strategies for attaining those goals. Only once these goals are clearly defined, can project initiatives be ranked against these goals.

Failure to adequately identify, document and track requirements

The good news is that for the most part, project managers accept the idea that requirements need to be identified, documented and tracked.  Misunderstandings regarding requirements must be revealed and cleared up as early as possible because the cost of fixing them goes up exponentially as the project progresses.

Failure to set and manage expectation

We know that setting expectations and then managing them is a key project success factor. To quote the PMBoK (Project Management Body of Knowledge) guide: “Proper scope definition is critical to project success.”  Problems arise when the setting and managing of expectations and scope are overly informal or excessively formal.  In other words, if expectations are documented in a way that is unclear or too open to interpretation, or not documented at all, it is difficult or even impossible to manage them because there will be a continuous lack of agreement regarding what they mean.

Conversely, if expectations and the means of managing them are too rigid and set in stone, there will be insufficient flexibility to accommodate requests for the project scope changes that must be accommodated because of normal business changes during project execution.

To use a term that is hot right now, we need “extreme” communication, this means frequent communication with the customer, on scope and the impacts that are driving scope in order to manage expectations well.

Projects, no matter how big or small, will influence the current operations of an organisation.  There will be a business process, or put simply “a way of doing things”, which will be impacted by what is being implemented.  Successfully managing a project means that every aspect or possible impact on the organisation has been thought of and managed.  It is critical therefore to ensure that communication and change management form part of the project deliverables.

At Intuate Group, we work to ensure that the application meets the client existing and future needs.  A study by the Standish Group demonstrated that many IT projects not only fail to deliver the benefits predicted, but that 75 percent of the software developed was either never used or was cancelled prior to delivery.  To ensure that there is no gap between implementation and use, it is critical that all the users are trained, kept aware of the changes and managed through them accordingly, and that the application can be supported by the internal staff once the project is completed.  Once this is done, it is still not time for us to up-and-leave, rather we remain in the organisation for a mentorship period afterwards, to ensure that the product is fully operational and utilised.  This is the only way to guarantee return on investment.

Governance and quality are critical factors and should form part of project managers’ and administrators’ key performance indicators.  The Intuate Group project management methodology is based on industry best practice, but over the years we have also documented our own methodologies.  We do not follow a standard off-the-shelf project management methodology for all types of deployments, but rather call on specific product methodologies also, which directly pertain to the specific types of projects, from data centre relocations to infrastructure implementations.  This means that we come to our clients with years of collective experience and specific know-how.

About Intuate Group

Intuate Group is a privately owned, broad based IT company that focuses on providing professional, integrated technology and people resources solutions. Its services encompass the provision of state-of-the-art contact centre solutions, the supply and implementation of best-of-breed IT solutions, as well as IT strategy and consulting. The company is also a partner of choice for business intelligence, project management, the management and support of IT infrastructure – specifically storage and server consolidation – and the provision of resources. For more information, please visit www.intuategroup.com.

CONTACTS:

Intuate Group, Nicolette de Wit, +27 11 302-1200, NdeWit@intuategroup.com

icomm, Debbie Sielemann, +27 82 414-4633, debbie@pr.co.za, www.icomm-pr.co.za

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