7 Tips on How to Fail a Project (7 Don’ts of a Project Manager)
Everyone talks about the success of projects on the web and provides tips on flawless project delivery all the time. But there’s the other side of the coin: let’s talk about project failure today. What should you do to fail?
Your project (or projects) definitely won’t be crowned with success if you do at least one of the following.
Allocate resources based on “urgency” and “importance” of tasks that are defined by you or other employees.
As a result, your employees will work on dozens of tasks simultaneously switching from one assignment to another without being focused on anything at all. Bad multitasking will result in bottlenecks which then definitely cause a project delay. This is what you want, isn’t it?
Don’t take inter-project relations into account.
Who cares about them? One project doesn’t have anything to do with another one. Manage every single project separately and do them one by one. Some resources can be idle at one project while other critical employees are overloaded at another one. This will lead to missed project due dates for sure.
Add extra time to every task so that an employee knows he or she has more than enough time to accomplish their tasks.
Your resources will procrastinate and start working on the task at the latest moment possible, because there’s plenty of time for it. But not everybody; other resources will start on time but use all the time allocated for the task, even if they need twice less. Well, yes, Student syndrome and Parkinson’s law will definitely show their effect.
Let your people do as many tasks in parallel as needed or as he or she feels comfortable with.
Well, if they say they’re ok, why should you bother?! And moreover, if Julius Caesar could, why can’t your employees? They will be overloaded, but it’s more important not to let them be idle.
Make ad-hoc project decisions and see what happens in reality.
Come hell or high water, right? Forget about resource management solutions that use AI to test project changes and predict project outcomes. You don’t need them, because no risk, no fun.
Let clients change project requirements throughout the whole project life cycle.
Why not? They’re those who pay, so they set the rules of this game. Clients may change their mind and decide they need a completely different product, so your task is to switch the team to another goal and change all the environment correspondingly. Are you asking about other projects in the environment? Well, they will wait. The client’s requirements have changed, and other customers will understand that.
Don’t analyze historical data and don’t create lessons learned documents.
They’re useless: one thing cannot happen twice. Every project is unique, so you don’t have to make any conclusions out of the experience.
Do you do anything from the list? Well done!
Seriously though, if you do, immediately stop it. Wanna know how to save your environment with a resource management solution? Visit our blog to read some useful articles on the topic and learn how to protect your business from failure or book a call with our experts and learn how an AI-driven resource management solution together with the right approach to multi-project management can help you reach your business goals.
