Text 3 How to Keep a Good Project on Track? Here Are 1o Tips

My columns about the qualities of good managers and good employees prompted Michael Sullivan of Walt Disney Feature Animation to ask about the qualities of a good project.

"You need good employees and a good manager but a project doesn't exist in a vacuum," Sullivan wrote. "It has to fit in with a company's strategy, work alongside projects from other groups, and someone has to make sure that projects aren’t overlapping too much. How do you assess whether a project's good or not and how do you keep them on track?"

There aren't magic formulas, of course, but I do have a few tips on choosing and managing projects.

1. Choose projects carefully. Work on projects that are large enough to he worthwhile and for which your basic skills qualify you to succeed. You should probably be cautious if a company that has a better combination of capabilities is already ahead of you in the market.

Establish a timeline for completion. Make it realistic, not arbitrary, but don't let it be too long, When a project lasts more man a couple of years, it's pretty tough to maintain the freshness and responsiveness.

2. Keep the customer scenario clearly in mind. In good projects, the people involved are always thinking about the customer: How will the customer use your work? Why will it be better than what they had before, or the way they worked before?

3. Let employees know the project is important. When everybody understands mat they are involved in an endeavor mat matters, it builds enthusiasm and a sense of teamwork. It helps people draw on the best of what they have to offer and on the strengths of other good people.

4. Keep employees informed and involved. People working on a project should broadly understand its constraints. How quickly does it need to get done? What are the financial limitations? It's natural for different people to have different primary concerns because everybody brings individual expertise to a project. But there should be a common sense of the progress that is being made and where the difficult areas are.

5. Meet across boundaries. In well-managed projects, meetings frequently involve people from different disciplines and even different organizations within a company. It's easier to track the status of a project if everybody's talking. Meetings needn't all be in-person, nor should they be. Electronic mail makes it easy for managers to keep everybody in a project involved and to provide status reports that mix descriptive and numeric information. Really good managers pick a metric, such as a specific comparison to a competitive product, and really go overboard updating their people on how the product under development measures up.

One of the most important status reports is the very last one. People should get together, in person or otherwise, to conduct a post mortem. This practice helps the organization learn from its experiences.

6. Keep in touch with the progress and morale of the crew. Using e-mail makes it easy to survey people in a project. Do they think they^,ve got common goals? Whaf^,s their outlook about the project? You can also get indirect insight into how a team feels about a project by monitoring the rate at which people transfer out of it to other parts of the company; an exodus suggests trouble.

7. Share bad news. When parts of a project aren't going well, there must be a willingness to spread the information and get every-body engaged with it. Encountering problems is almost inevitable: failing to recognize and deal with problems is not

8. Make tradeoff decisions crisply. You want to minimize the number of big changes during a project, but you don't want to be overly rigid, either. It^,s vital to be able to adjust to developments in me marketplace or to new goals suggested by customers. The trick is to make the decision process crisp, with tradeoffs explicitly agreed upon.

Too often, management doesn't really acknowledge the need; for tradeoffs. In the software world, for example, if management says, "We want this product to be feature rich and very small and get done overnight, "they're asking for everything with little appreciation of the tradeoffs involved. Sometimes managers who make unrealistic demands hound people when the demands aren't met. This undermines the project by clouding the decision-making process. In contrast, when the need for tradeoffs is acknowledged up front, decision-makers are free to search for the cleverest combination of met and unmet goals.

9. Know when to give up. Sometimes projects that seemed like a good idea when started don't prove to be successful. Recognizing that you should give up will be far easier if you've established crisp goals and monitor your progress toward them. You don't want to give up prematurely or let down your customers, but you also have to recognize a lost cause. Companies that appear to the outside world as if they are doing well all the time owe their success in part to a willingness to listen intently to customers and change focus as the market shifts or as they recognize where they can make a better contribution.

When you contemplate a risky project, or if you need to undertake a risky project, try to hire people who will be useful elsewhere in your organization. That way if the project doesn't succeed, you can move most of the people to other productive roles.

10. Finally, breed a sense of healthy competitiveness.

Performance and satisfaction both rise when there is a competitive spirit You don't need to go overboard on this, but a projects prospects for success go up when the people involved are consciously trying to do better than a competitor or a past practice.