10 Ways to to Increase Your Project's Success

This week I'm presenting project management workshops at The College of St. Scholastica's Brainerd and St. Clound (MN) campuses.  The workshops are titled "10 Ways to Increase Your Project's Success".  In these workshops I discuss the importance of Risk Management in managing projects and identify the most common sources of project failures.  As part of this workshop we discuss how these sources of project failure affect our projects and then we develop plans to mitigate these failure sources.

There are many websites, articles, and other publications discussing the top sources of project failures but I found the Whitten and Bentley (2007) text best articulates these sources of failure.  Below is my adaptation of the authors' list of sources of project failure:

1. Missing Project Champion
2. Process Shortcuts
3. Expectations Management
4. Variable Lock-In
5. Estimating Techniques
6. Optimism
7. Resource Assumptions
8. People Management
9. Adapting to Change
10. Insufficient Resources

Over the next several posts I will discuss each of these sources and describe how participants at the workshops view the impact of these sources of failure on the project and how we plan to mitigate these issues in future projects.

More to come...

Reference

Whitten, J.L., & Bentley, L.D. (2007). System analysis and design methods (7th ed.). Boston, MA: McGrawHill/Irwin.