A Project’s Success Depends on Risk Factors and Buy-In From Your Audiences

by | Jan 23, 2006 | Observations, Tecknowledgy

How do you define “success” in your organization?
An interesting new white paper, “10 Keys for Project Success” from Retail Process Engineering crossed my desk the other day – and made me pause a moment. When was the last time you even thought about how to make a project more successful – especially in technology-related activities?
We’re all so busy building our business and meeting our deadlines that it’s hard to stop and justify measuring the process, much less figuring out ways to make it better. However, two of the paper’s suggestions caught my attention:
1.Prepare for the Inevitable – you’ve got to plan ahead and anticipate the blips that make up our daily lives. After all, when was the last time you started your day with a pre-defined agenda and actually accomplished everything on the page without interruption, diversion or a complete departure from the list?
2.Gain User Acceptance With Change Management – boy is this ever true! The paper says, “The project team needs to move users from one comfort zone to another,” and I totally agree. When your organization changed its systems to improve your processes, did you actually stop to think about the users of your systems and software versus the bottom line? Too often, we’re caught up trying to bring more efficient ways to manage our productivity, but more often than not, we forget that we have to influence the “people” perhaps more than any other factor.
Let me know what you think about these 10 keys, and what your own solutions might be … I’ll post them in a future blog.
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