I liked this article by Safinaaz Rawji on why projects fail. We have a key speaker, David Maxfield, who no doubt will have much to say about this list:

As managers, we have experienced project failure in some shape or form. It can come from working on a project you know should have not have passed through the governance body and now you have no choice but to lead, or it can be a project that has incredible
potential but no one is on board.

Below is a list of common signs/causes of project failure…

1. Project Manager is worried about losing their job or upsetting the leadership team.
2. Client expectations are not realistic and cannot be met.
3. Client/leadership keeps changing the project design.
4. Wrong resources assigned to the project/tasks.
5. Poor or lack of Communication with the client, stakeholders, etc.
6. Lack of involvement from stakeholders.
7. Poor planning - planning is to rigid and doesn't give space to handle any issues/risks. Planning is solely done by project managers.
8. Absence of Risk Management
9. Management works to make senior management/director/VP's happy.
10. Project is based on CXO's dream with no clear vision or business value.

Just read a great article from Mike Gordon of the MIT Sloan Management Review. After surveying more than 300 employees at 28 companies across North America, his team found that businesses with the best product development track records do three things better than their less successful peers.

• Create a clear sense of projects goals early on;
• Nurture a strong project culture;
• Maintain close contact with customers throughout a project's duration.

Of the three, what does your organization do best? I'm presently working with one web development company that has goals one and two nailed, but fell short recently on the third. It made a difference - we missed a client deliverable. I made two phone calls to make sure it didn't happen, but my primary contact person had taken a long weekend, with no message left for me and nothing to show my client. Trust blown.

How do you communicate with your folks when you know you'll be out of the office? You're entitled to vacation. How do you let your clients know you're still responsible for the project they've entrusted to you?

I'm struck by how smart Jonathan Feldman is when he identifies that the best PPM leaders have a balance of hard and soft skills. Let's face it - we often hire the sharpest, smartest engineers, and communication isn't necessarily in their skill set. It might never have had to be.

Here's what Feldman says: "Think of it as a balance of soft skills and technical acumen....These people are rare, but to be successful with PPM, you must find them, either inside or outside your organization, and put them to work. Don't limit yourself to IT. Are there savvy people in line departments who have an interest in solving the problem?"

That sentence is clear. You want "savvy" PPMs - people who can read people, empathize with them, help them get the job done, and then get out of the way. At the root of this skill is not smarts or business sense or anything remotely alpha dog - it's about - dare I say it -  love.

Second, you want people who want to solve the problem. Easy to say, not so easy to find. How many meetings revolve around everyone's take on an issue? Does this solve the problem, or merely keep it alive? We all need to know when our point of view is less important than just getting the job done. And this, when it comes down to it, is about letting go of self, and rediscovering our essential humility, even when the stakes are high.

--Marti @ the Summit

Fieldsman's article "Get Your Projects in Line" appears in the March 8, 2010 issue of Information Week.

Information Week recently published a piece by Jonathan Feldman called "Get Your Projects in Line." He's trying to save you money, because "a practical PPM implementation, sized correctly for your organization, can boost IT's credibility and effectiveness." I like his proactive approach:

1. Decide on what problem you're solving and how to know when you've solved it.
2. Fit your PPM governance to either a grassroots or top-down approach.
3. Implement a governance framework, but keep your perspective.
4. Match the implementer to the initiative.
5. Get real about work capacity and financial management.
6. Pick your budget and battles.
7. It's not about the tool, but it's important to define a toolset.
8. Don't get hung up on automated integration.
9. Educate, close the loop, and begin again.

Points too good to gloss over. We'll tease these out in future posts.

-- Marti @ the Summit

Thanks again to David Maxfield for helping us understand what's going on when everybody knows a project is broken, but nobody speaks up. Maxfield calls this phenomenon "project chicken."

When project participants play project chicken, the status and review process becomes a joke. In numerical terms, here's what that means:

• 78% of projects exceed budget
• 86% miss deadlines
• 74% have missing or wrong functionality or quality problems
• Team morale is damaged on 54% of projects
• 23% have a long list of problems to be resolved after the project ends.

Tired of playing project chicken? Come to RPS 2010 in La Jolla.

--Marti @ the Summit

Many thanks to David Maxfield and Vital Smarts for providing us with these insights on AWOL sponsors. An AWOL sponsor doesn't provide leadership, political clout, time, or energy to see a project through to completion. David will be a speaker at the 2010 Resource Planning Summit.

Key findings include:

• 65 percent of project leaders experience problems with AWOL sponsors.
• About half of those make some attempt to bring up their concerns.
• 88 percent indicate that conversations on this subject are difficult if not impossible to have in their organizations.
• Fewer than one in five project leaders who suffer from AWOL sponsors are able to hold the crucial conversation in a way that solves the problem.

When the project leader fails to resolve AWOL sponsor problems, projects are destined the fail.

Resonate with you? Sure did with me.

--Marti @ the Summit

If you haven't heard, I'll fill you in. Early registrants (between now and June 15) for the 2010 Resource Planning Summit will be entered into a drawing for the chance to win one of three Apple iPads.

Here's the best review I've read so far: http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/03/apple-ipad-review/

Props to Joshua Topolsky for helpful insights like these:

• The iPad is all about its screen, and Apple's 9.7-inch LED backlit IPS display does not disappoint;
• As far as actual navigation on the device goes, it really is exactly like the iPhone;
• We'd like to point out that we haven't mentioned files, folders, or windows. That's because there's no such thing in the universe of the iPad;
• The iPad browser doesn't support Flash, and won't support Flash, perhaps ever.

Check out the complete review, which is rich with detail and features terrific photographs. Whether you like Apple or not, you've probably been curious about the iPad. So register early, and come away a winner.

I'm charmed by Jurgen Appelo, a "writer, speaker, developer, entrepreneur, manager, blogger, reader, dreamer, leader, freethinker, and… Dutch guy." Jurgen lives at http://www.noop.nl/

1. When you send an email message to your manager, make the number of people in the cc proportional to the number of complaints in that message. If it's really serious, send the cc to the whole organization.
2. To any urgent verbal request from your manager, reply that you will be working on it straight away. Then ignore it. Repeat this procedure until your manager starts turning blue, then send your manager a hyperlink to some web page about "servant leadership."
3. Select any two arbitrary departments and complain that there's too little communication between them. One hour later, complain about time wasted in too many meetings.
4. Tell your manager that you can never find the time to work on self-development, because of the sheer size of your workload. Then one hour later, book a lengthy vacation.

**(On point #4...RPS 2010 delivers on self-development speakers, and San Diego is sure nice for vaca :)

- Marti@theSummit

I wish I could have gone to last year's Resource Planning Summit, even if just to hear Art Mortell. He is a well-known motivational speaker in technology circles. and he had suggestions not for just surviving stress, but thriving on it. Replace your negative addictions with positive ones, such as:

• Exercise (especially aerobic)
• Work
• Relationships
• Solitude (mediation, spiritual solitude, personal solitude)

If you drop a negative addiction, try to replace it with a positive one. This will lessen the anxiety of dropping the negative addiction. Happiness, he adds, is "modifying our expectations to keep ourselves in balance."

Are you a perfectionist? Or do you keep things in perspective?

--Marti @ the Summit

Here's a neat, short video that shows attendees sharing feedback on the 2009 Resource Planning Summit.  I was impressed with what these conference attendees had to say. Usually I am not interested in what conference attendees going have to say. I figure they were bribed with ice cream or something stronger. But there was something about their thoughtfulness that humbled me. There's no fancy footage here, but these folks are sincere, and I was genuinely, stupidly moved. I heard how resource planning can revolutionize the entire product development life cycle, not to mention project management.

Apparently everybody -- that's right, everybody -- who attended last year's Resource Planning Summit said they would come back. That doesn't happen at most conferences. At least not the ones I've been attending