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IdealogueSessionOne014

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We (JerryWeinberg and BobKing), the presenters of this session, decided to spend the next few months cooking up a StartingRightArticleCurrentDraft as a means of clarifying and coalescing our ideas surrounding effectively starting projects. We invite any wikers to toss their ingredients into our stew pot. From this convergence of ideas, we will design and present our session.

Who is the audience?

I see two primary audiences: leaders who start projects and team members who start on projects. We might have to choose which audience to focus on. Or perhaps, we could use some sort of dialog structure to the article to represent these two sides. Maybe we could use the situation of the project manager interviewing someone who is to be an early team member on a beginning project. Or maybe a project sponsor who is thinking of starting a project interviewing a prospective project manager. We could use the interviews as the here and now of the article and step off from there to describe other situations where significant stuff happened. (BobKing)

Or someone who has been invited to be a project manager of a project that "hasn't started," so they would know what to watch out for - things that had already started.

Or anyone who has been invited to participate in a project that's "new." (JerryWeinberg)

What is the hook?

People want to be involved in successful projects, and we will hook these people with the promise that they will be able to recognize at the beginning which projects have a good chance for success versus those that have been set up to fail or to become death marches.

What is a successful project?

BIG success is a project which provides a significant positive result to an organization (ie., has moved that organization to a more productive or profitable state) and people on that project were treated with respect and as adults. (BobKing)

Maybe it has some significant social purpose, too? (JerryWeinberg)

We will need to differentiate between project success and individual success on a project. I guess a really successful project provides both kinds of success - moderately successful project might be able to only provide some level of individual successes to its members and some mitigated success to the organization directly. (BobKing)

I'd say a successful project is successful to the extent that it accomplishes what the participants wish to accomplish. Thus, it will generally be differently successful to different parties. (JerryWeinberg)

Are we providing signs of successful projects to find or signs of failed projects to avoid? Or both... I seem to be heading towards a list of indicators that can be seen early on. (BobKing)

Some people will want to succeed; others would be quite happy if they just didn't fail. (JerryWeinberg)

What are some of these indicators?

I think we can already begin to group to these indicators Maybe:

• sponsorship
• organizational
• project managerial
• cultural
• historical
• personal
• team

and more I am sure

• is the project formed around a problem or a solution? If it is formed around a problem, is there access to the symptoms? If it is formed around a solution, can the problem statement be found and the logic connecting that problem to this solution be found?
• What constraints are already in place? People chosen, money budgeted, in addition to a solution approach possibly chosen.
• What are the expectations, explicit and implicit, of the people who are paying for the project?
• is the significance to the organization understood and communicated?
• Do we know who in the organization represents the organization?
• Is the significance of the significance understood and consistent with what is happening on the project so far?
• Is any of this written down?
• Body language
• Defensiveness
• Cultural stuff (maybe something about history..)

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