Is this the worst news possible in project management?
All the money has been spent, and nothing has been delivered ... nothing has been earned!
Yikes! What happened to get the project to this point?
Did you fear the data?
- Were you fearful of the data, unwilling to measure or unwilling to believe the measurements of value attainment?
- Or worse yet, you actually don't know how to measure value attainment.
- Or even more worse, you kill the messenger who has the data!
What value is to be attained?
And by the way, it's damn hard to measure increment value attainment if, at the outset, you have no idea of the value to be attained. (the so-called emergent project .... feed in money and hope! something useful comes out)
And here is another fear: Fearful of making and estimate because, actually, you have no idea of what its going to take to do the project. And fearful that as resource expenditures pile up that there is nothing to show for it.
Most often, that occurs when you've made no estimate of the value requirement ... project outputs ... and the corresponding inputs required for such outputs.
So, how to be anti-fearful?
- A priori estimates are a must
- Metrics that represent attainment are a must
- Data transparency is a must (don't kill the messenger or hide the message under a project rock)
- Aggressive reaction to metric data is a must
- Pro-active look-ahead where possible.
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