Project Management Tips

Money Can't Buy Good Beginnings, continued...

Keeping goals modest and breaking down deliverables is key to success

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Keep Goals Modest; Break Down Deliverables

This story teaches us an important lesson. When contemplating the beginning of a new project keep your goals modest. Trying to accomplish too much is a major cause of project failure. Breaking down your deliverables and managing their scope is a solid project philosophy that certainly subscribes to the notion that less is more. As we have discussed, when teams gather to implement projects they have a myriad of obstacles to overcome: communication breakdown, miscalculating the time and effort a task will require, Murphy's Law, renegade vendors, and much more. The factor of difficulty grows quickly when a smaller project is transformed into an over ambitious one.

Some experts have found that 60% to 70% of after delivery maintenance costs can be greatly reduced by having a strategy that minimizes mistakes usually caused by over ambitious project deliverables. Keeping your project strategy simple helps insure that your project team makes fewer mistakes. And that means at the end of the day, there will be less to go back and fix, after the final product is delivered to the client. This can help to greatly reduce costs associated with on-going maintenance, saving you big money down the line.

It is the job of the responsible manager to direct the expectations from both below and above in the chain of command. The employees in your stead may not realize the damage that can come from putting too many eggs in their project baskets. Beware of acquiescent workers that offer a "quick yes" to project questions. And management may be pressuring to achieve great, heroic things in relation to deliverables, timelines and budgets. Despite external forces that may be acting upon your projects, communicate and execute a proven strategy: take large-scale projects and break them down into smaller, digestible parts. Giant projects tend to break under their own weight. It is in your best interest to simplify as much as possible, to keep your precious resources from getting lost in a never ending world of perpetual development and implementation.



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