Services

Manage the pitfalls

Depending on its size or complexity, projects may be intrinsically and unavoidably prone to pitfalls by its own nature. Snags due to intermingled processes and aggravated by competing expectations, are omnipresent and as consequence multi-layered defenses are created, which characterize some projects.

The project philosophy is to provide an array of defenses so that only a combination of breakdowns would permit failure. However, because of the ‘first time’ uniqueness of projects, most run as broken systems, but continues to function because of the many redundancies and reliance on a critical mass of skilled resources. The risk of failure changes constantly, because of the dynamic nature of a project, necessitating management of change. There is not often an isolated ‘cause’ of failure, there are multiple contributors to a breakdown and the linking these causes together identifies the circumstances.

Some combinations or permutation of any of the following top ten reasons for failing projects, can affect the project success significantly:

  • Unaligned expectations
  • Implementation before base-lined
  • Inexperience/untrained resources
  • Inadequate or inaccessible systems
  • Team Conflict
  • Misaligned Resources (Square peg in Round hole)
  • Changing priorities
  • Uncontrolled scope
  • Significant change in leadership
  • Insufficient progress measurement and monitoring

Dyadanac – adding defenses, not adding to the existing complexity

Following investigations or pro-actively, Dyadanac supports defenses which include organizational, institutional and regulatory remedies (e.g. policies and procedures, certification, work rules, team training) and human components (e.g. skills, experience and knowledge), but also:

  • Ensure unambiguous demonstration of support for the project, and obtain authority for the project and project manager
  • Agreement on clear expectations for the project outcome, clear statement of the scope and nature of the project, and align project in align with objectives.
  • Balance between driving production, and pro-actively preventing break-downs
  • Resolving ambiguity between efficiency towards targets and risks of their consequences
  • Balancing the mix of practitioners and trainees with varying degrees of expertise
  • Evaluating characteristics (penalizing/beneficial) of changes
  • Continuous improvement, investigating specific incidents or events, or identifying trends

As the leader and pivot for all project interfaces, the Project Manager requires special leadership and management skills

Dyadanac can assist the Project Manager with training and techniques:

  • Appropriate planning (not to little or not to complex)
  • Leading versus Doing
  • Delivering versus Tasks
  • Managing the triple constraints (time, scope, cost)
  • Effective communication
  • Valuable time management
  • Leveraging diagnostics
  • Focus on forecasting versus administrating