7 RULES TO GUARANTEE PROJECT FAILURE

Rule 1: Deliver, Deliver, Deliver
When in doubt, you only have to remember that your main task in life is to deliver results, no matter what happens. You motto is”Sticks and stones may break my team’s bones, but I will meet all my milestones.” Stay so focused on delivering results that you ignore extraneous things like quality assurance, testing, communications, team management, and a little touch of humanity, because all these things only serve to distract you from your main objective of delivering at all cost.

Rule 2: Forget Planning- It’s for Wimps
Since your firms has really smart systems architects and business consultants who create excellent e-business designs, you don’t really need all the administrative and financial overhead of planning and controlling your projects. Your e-business designs are so well thought out that they will implement themselves, with no need for project intervention. Also, everyone knows that unless you have unusually well-funded projects, stakeholders are often unwilling to foot the bill for the project planning and specification. Make yourselves a star in you firm by helping to eliminate all those unbillable cost.

Rule 3: Whip Your Team to Higher Performance
The secret to deliver successful results on time and under budget is to work your team as hard as you can. Sleep is for the weak, it’s cheaper to buy coffee than to hire people. Personally take the credit for success and blame your team for failures. You only need to gather all people who aren’t currently working on other projects and instruct them to produce, and produce. If one of your team members falls sick, isolate that member in a cubicle and turn up the heat. Since you are expected to have a holistic understanding of what your team members do and how they contribute to your projects, take things to the next level by telling them how to do their jobs. For example, if you started off as a Web designer, you have every right to tell your design them what color makes the pages and how big the fonts should be; if you constructed in vertical construction, tell your design team how to build the structural’s; if you handed any other project and worked your way up the ranks for 20 years, you know better than anyone else and can revise, invent and change at whim.

Rule 4: Remember that Communication is for Losers
All this project management stuff should be obvious to the troops. It’s just a matter of applying brainpower where it’s needed. If they want clarification, appoint a peon to generate copious amounts of paper. It doesn’t matter if the documents don’t say anything; the key is to overwhelm any objections with binder upon the binder plans, checklist, reports, and spreadsheets. The leader knows best.
Meetings are great for your project, and you should strive to hold meetings with your team at least four or five times a day. Creating meeting agendas are being a waste do time. You just have to go with the flow. Call a meeting and then ask people what they want to talk about. Randomly discuss issues as they come to mind. If people actually have the gall to start questioning your project designs, become really defensive and start shouting at these” narrow-minded and negative thinkers,” who just don’t get it.

Rule 5: Execute the Big-Bang Effect
The conventional wisdom in the New Economy states that whoever is first to market reaps the most competitive advantage; therefore, you can’t afford to waste your time with staged implementations and iterative cycles. All these things take up too much time and just add unnecessary administrative overhead. As the universe was created with one Big Ban, execute your project in one Big Step Push your team to relentlessly generate deliverables without taking a moment to look at what you are actually doing. You can always go back and fix your problems later. The critical factor is to keep generating deliverables.

Rule 6: rely on Common Sense
Thinking of getting education in project management? You don’t really need all that mumbo jumbo about Gantt Charts, WBS and cost analysis. All you really need is good old sense, good instincts, and you’re lucky rabbit’s foot. What is it going to take to launch a mission-critical enterprise-level project? I just need to throw plenty of smart bodies at the project, push them to wok 20-hours days, and then do the deliverables to start coming out.

Rule 7: Rub Your Clients the Right Way
Since the New Economy revolves around the concept of creating a premium customer experience, you want to make sure that you take every possible step to satisfy every client request, no matter how stupid or frivolous or how long it delays our project. All you have to do is to refocus your resources, randomly reassign people from other task, and squeeze you project team even harder, making sure you extract every last ounce of energy. Then squeeze some more.


For discussion:
1. What key issues do the rules surface?
2. What are the sub-issues [both explicit and implied] of the rules? How many have you identified [both explicit and implied]?
3. What is your position on each of the issues you have identified in #’s 1 & 2?
4. Cite observed and/or personal experiences with any of the issues ant its resultant effects.
5. What action plans are relevant to all the above in order to identify, mitigate, arrest and eliminate their exixtence?

Courtesy to the original author