Keep your friends close and your enemies closer

Somebody once said that politics is probably the most important part of the project management. In my relatively short 14 years professional life I have seen people promoted after making company loose more than 500k and on the other hand, people being fired after very successful implementations but failing to deliver their success to the management.

So how do we keep our friends close and our enemies closer? In my previous postings I talked about making everything visible. This is extremely important part of message delivery as well as reducing the chance of being set up during or after the project is done. I hate to sound paranoid but those are the brutal facts and rather than sticking our head in a pile of sand, we should face them and be prepared. On the other, more positive note, we are talking about approach that can bring more participants to our project and open it up for more acceptance and success.

I might be missing something, but I have not come across any structured suggested approach on how to do with that so here are my thoughts: one of the Key Project Artifacts is a Concern (see screenshot below). Concern can be opened by any member of the project team or any stakeholder and, in Project Ground rules is considered the only media where people can express their concerns or ideas regarding Project's agenda, objectives, goals, deliverable, schedule or any other critical component.

Concern can be further linked to a Risk or an Issue. It is being raised against a party - usually a Role in the Project or Group of participants, i.e. Consultant, Developer, PM, etc. It has top be either Dismissed or declared Valid. If declared Valid, a Risk should be associated to a Concern which will fall under your Risk Management (I will definitely address this in my further blogs). The following list some of the statuses you can use to manage Concerns: {Concept; Raised; Under Review; Valid; Dismissed; Deferred}. Those statuses can be managed thru a workflow, process driven (i.e. Ground Rule says that only PM can change the status) or managed thru field level security http://kwizcom.com/ProductPage.asp?ProductID=1048&ProductSubNodeID=1049 in case your PMIS is SharePoint based.





See you next time