SessId027

How to Run Your Project into the Ground and Ruin Any Hope Of Success

If you're a Secret Service agent assigned to protect the President, you have to think of all the possible ways the President can be threatened. The same is true for projects. As a risk-conscious project manager, you have to think of all the things that could cause your project to fail. But that's hard to do wholeheartedly, because we want so much for things to work out well. This session won't make you a proficient project saboteur, but it will provide a humorous look at all the probable and completely improbable things that can and do go wrong-a look that all project managers will enjoy.

NEWS at the top! Here's our latest added information about our session design: Min: 7 people Max: none or room constraints

Teaser about our musing. We have two simulations planned. Each one tells a tale about how our actions can help or crush a project.

Stay tuned! More soon!

Becky: RickBrenner and I (BeckyWinant) thought this could be a lot of fun. Rick provided the inspiration as he has been collecting and writing stories based on true (as Dave Barry says, I'm not making this up) stories.

Sometimes the ridiculous turns into the sublime. As a colleague once told me: nothing is useless, it can always serve as a bad example. Once we have faced the worst, all ideas for reform are plausible. How we choose to reform is an interesting topic that we may follow in this session.

Where would you like to take this?

From BruceBakken: I find it interesting that as of today (7-24) this is the only "project" oriented session with a description to it. Nothing yet in sessions 3, 10, or 24. On the other hand, I bet there will be a lot of interesting stories (and learnings) from most every attendee. Looks like a lot of fun and then some!

Bruce - Thanks. When you're on a terminal project, you may find it hard to laugh. So, from a distance at AYE we hope to take crazy behavior to its illogical limit. - BeckyWinant

Bruce - Take a look at SessId035 and SessId038, which are also about projects. I've sent a message to the folks about the other ones - I think they've been too busy with their projects to spend much time on the wiki. - JerryWeinberg

NEWS FLASH. Stop the presses. The schedule has just been changed! (How old is this news flash? DickKarpinski)

Familiar to those in Projectland, right? Rick and I were talking about the effect of someone's action in a project. We noticed that many well intending people do something that backfires. For example, a person trying to make the timeline or workflow more efficient or trying to please a customer might take action in a way that produces an unintended result.

Maybe some actions have a different effect than intended. Maybe some actions are only dastardly to a few participants and none-the-less crushing to those few. I wondered if some AYE participants have observed this same phenomenon. What is your experience with frustrating project behaviors? --BeckyWinant

My "Project Pitfalls" article that is posted on the AYE Articles and Essays page addresses many of these issues. It was written while I was managing a crunch project for a client with conflicting views about the project. JamesWard

You may want to review the article "Projects From Hell" in the August 2000 issue of CONTRACT PROFESSIONAL. It quotes conference participants BeckyWinant and SharonMarshRoberts. JamesWard

Thanks, James. We all have Project from Hell stories! What are yours? -- BeckyWinant

In honor of Halloween, the October issue of Software Development magazine has a number of Tales of Terror. More horror stories....maybe some of them useful. And one of the stories was submitted by JohannaRothman.- BruceBakken

Hey Bruce, thanks for noticing :-). JohannaRothman

See NEWS at the top! (Bruce, your Halloween reference is just right for what Rick and I have been talking about!) - BeckyWinant

"Nothing" and "always" in the same sentence! That's two red flags at once! Let me argue that many things that should be used as bad examples can't be, because even mentioning them makes everybody feel bad and turn off or away to something else. Thus I argue that many things are wasted, even must be wasted, and are best left to decay without further attention. Those things become PerniciousTruths and can be used in MindBombs to evade rational consideration. -- DickKarpinski

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Updated: Sunday, October 22, 2000