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A sure way to project failure

July 6, 2001

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A life in a high-tech career is a life of projects. Your work will be made of projects large and small. While there is no sure way of assuring a project's success, there are many specific ways of insuring its failure. In fact, sometimes it is possible to kill a project before it even gets off the ground. Below are some of the usual project pitfalls and what you can do to avoid them.

Front line input

The single most important task when starting a new project, especially a high-tech one, is to get input from the people who will actually be using the system you are developing. For a web site, this would be the customers who will be using the site to place orders or get information. Inside a company, this might mean the people working the tech support lines or placing the purchase orders.

I don't think it is too harsh to say that without this very important input your project will be sabotaged from day one. Too often, projects are imposed from above without any concern to those who will actually have to make them work. Some projects will take a 2 step process and turn it into 4 steps or more when a few minutes spent with front line people could have shown that one step or another was unnecessary in the first place. Front line workers understand how processes need to be handled, in what order, by whom. Get this wrong and the project will sit unused and productivity will suffer.

Talk to the front line people at the start of a project. Don't wait until you are putting the final touches on the look and feel. If you do, you will find that no one will be happy; not the users, the management or yourself.

Time is on my side

When I started working in high-tech full-time back in 1986 my boss and I often had to give estimates for providing various services and features on an early online service. The office joke ran, "take Doug's estimate and Tim's estimate, add them together and divide by 2." What is sad is this was more reality than a joke. I chronically overestimated the time required and my boss chronically underestimated.

Both extremes can lead to major problems in getting a project going. If you provide a project schedule measured in years instead of weeks or months, the client is likely to abandon the project or go in search of someone else. If you underestimate the time involved you will be facing missed deadlines from the day you begin the project. Neither of these scenarios is going to improve relationships with your client.

If the project is truly huge, you will need to break it down into smaller parts, each with their own deadline. Each phase should have defined deliverables and a firm deadline. This allows the client to see the scope of the project and gain an understanding of why it might take years to accomplish the entire task.

If you have underestimated the time involved in a project you need to sit down with your client immediately and detail why the project will take longer than planned and how you intend to approach it. Nothing sours a relationship more quickly than missed deadlines. If you consistently miss deadlines you are virtually guaranteeing that this client will never work with you again. It can also lead to problems receiving payment for the work you have already completed.

Money, money, money

Finally, make sure your budget for a project has some basis in reality. Huge fees will send clients looking elsewhere, underbidding will send your company into bankruptcy. More important, though, is not to be seen as someone who is constantly "nickel & dime-ing" the client to death. Make sure that all fees are carefully laid out and directly associated with some deliverable. Make sure you have a billing structure in place to handle the inevitable "change orders" that arise as the project moves forward.

Every project has issues that arise so you want to make sure that the client is not tacking on features that weren't in the original project scenario unless you will be paid for that extra work. Too often, change orders can lead to a very acrimonious relationship with the client and sometimes even to litigation. Careful preparation of a change order process and constant "sign off" by the client on each and every change order can help.

These 3 simple issues, if handled correctly, can help to insure that every project you work on proceeds smoothly and arrives at a successful conclusion.

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