Avoiding Obvious Mistakes – Project Management Tips from the Trenches

Competent and proactive project management is a major aspect of any company’s overall success – if you can’t deliver for your clients or yourselves on time and on budget, then the only way is down. Managing your projects in a controlled way will ensure that they are able to be completed in a timely fashion and that key stakeholders know exactly where they stand and what to expect throughout the process.
Problems will occur anyway – sometimes things just happen, and even the best-laid plans can’t do anything to prevent them. However, you can limit the likelihood of things happening by learning from mistakes made previously, whether they were made by you, someone at your company or someone you don’t know at all.
Here are four tips from the trenches, stemming from mistakes that have been made in the past. Keep these points in mind when planning any project and you’ll go a long way towards ensuring its success.
Decide upon and freeze expected outcomes
In 1997, EDS and SHL Systemhouse began work on a Canadian firearms registration system, a project which was only expected to cost $2 million once $117 million had been offset by licensing fees. Unfortunately, over a thousand changes in the first two years of operation were demanded by gun lobbyists and other groups, work which hadn’t been specified in the original contract. The government had to pay for this extra work, with costs standing at nearly $700 million by 2001, when the system was costing an additional $75 million to run annually.
The lesson here is to set the deliverables of the project before work has started and ensure that all stakeholders are aware of what they are. They should then be frozen and everyone should be aware that no further changes or expectations can be made – the project will deliver what has already been decided upon. This will prevent overspending and time delays as accommodations for new deliverables are made.
Consider long-term effects in the planning stage
The Y2K crisis occurred in the late 1990s when it was realised that digital legacy software would not be able to distinguish between the year 2000 and the year 1900 due to only being able to differentiate between years based on the last two digits of them (2000 and 1900 obviously both end in 00, which is where the problems arose). The designers of the original software systems had not foreseen the problem and it was feared that the millennium would destroy infrastructure and telecommunications across the globe.
Eventually, vast amounts of money were spent on updating the software systems and very little of note occurred, but the crisis demonstrates the effects of a lack of forward planning and no consideration for the long-term effects of one’s actions. When planning any project, think about how the project and its processes might affect things in the future or for other departments and try to come up with alternative ways of doing something if you think it might be problematic in any way.
Try not to trial new processes
The redevelopment of Wembley Stadium was heralded as a much-needed boost for English football, but the project was ultimately completed four years late (2007 rather than 2003) at a total cost of around £1 billion. There were a number of reasons for this, some unpredictable, but one issue that could have been avoided was the construction of the stadium’s now-iconic arch which stands above the pitch. It was justified as a design feature, despite having never been built by anyone, because it was load-bearing and would minimise the need for internal, potentially view-obscuring support posts inside the ground.
Projects that have formal budgets and deadlines are not the places to be trying out new things that have never been done before. It was inevitable that delays would occur because of the prototype arch design and, coupled with other problems throughout the construction process, it ensured that the project was completed late and over budget. While you might have new ideas for project processes, try not to experiment too much (if at all) with the way things are done unless it is clear that they are not working as they are.
Avoid micromanagement
While the pressure of being a project manager can be immense, micromanagement doesn’t help your team or the project. You need to trust the team to complete the tasks they are assigned by the deadlines specified – if they don’t, then you can hold them accountable, but you should do what you can to help them if they run into problems.


About the Author: Darren Ley is an L&D Consultant at Thales Learning & Development in the U.K. He began his career in research and development and project management, eventually making the natural switch to training and development with Thales, for whom he delivers accredited and non-accredited project management training.
Darren is a regular contributor to Enhance – The Magazine for Learning and Development.