Projects And How To Survive Them

By Klaus Tumuscheit

In this day and age everybody has to deal with projects in some way; as a principal, customer, project manager or team member. And everybody has mainly one goal: how can we make the project more successful? Unknown project traps are often the death of many projects that were initially approached with the highest level of commitment and passion. The results are waste of time, disagreement in the enterprise, above average fluctuation and in the end failure of project goals and frustration.

Initial excitement for a project is often quickly followed by some sort of disillusionment: the commitment declines, resources get scarce and time is running by. But most of the times the traps that project managers and teams encounter are the same.
Klaus Tumuscheit shows ways to cope with those returning traps and how you can master your project successfully.

The book includes a field guide and solutions that show you step by step how you can avoid those common traps and make the project a success.

The author shows based on his thirty years of experience in project management ten project traps which can have serious consequences for a company and how to avoid them. He describes vividly how project sabotage, budget cuttings and the delay of decisions threaten the project goal and how project managers can protect their work.

This book is a realistic practice report for everybody involved with projects.

Klaus Tumuscheit is one of the most prominent experts for project management in Germany. Since 1990 he is the managing director of his own management consultancy; he advises and trains leading international companies in all questions regarding project management.
His books were bestsellers in Germany and made it to the top 10 bestseller list of the Financial Times Germany and numerous other German financial newspapers. He sold more than 60.000 copies and his work has been critically acclaimed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Klaus Tumuscheit
• Release date: Apr 29, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301149940

Book preview

Projects and how to survive them

A project management guide for project managers and senior managers

Klaus Tumuscheit

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 Klaus Tuuscheit

License Notes: This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this ebook with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Ebook formatting by www.ebooklaunch.com

Table of Contents

Part one: From kick-off to the finished project

1 Projects equal frustration

2 Project assignment: The initial planning

3 Kick-off: The detailed plan

4 Implementation

Part 2: Day-to-day help for project managers.

5 An irritating problem: A department doesn’t know what it wants

6 Caution: What does the project user want?

7 Rolling planning

8 Advice for senior managers: The end of the project

9 The eternal project traps

10 The optimism trap

11 Decision arthritis

12 The Tyrannosaurus Effect

13 The Social Competence Trap

14 The parking lot trap

15 The expert trap

16 The bellyacher trap

17 The tools trap

18 Pointless meetings

19 The resources trap

20 A final word: Tackle it!

Part one: From kick-off to the finished project

1 Projects equal frustration

The unfortunate project manager

Being a project manager is anything but fun. Usually, the project just lands on your desk. Out of the blue, the boss announces, Here’s a project. Do it! And then you run around for eighteen hours a day chasing after unrealistic deadlines, laughably insufficient budgets and unattainable goals. The project turns your stomach. Sleeplessness, panic attacks before important interim deadlines and permanent pressure to succeed are your constant companions. Nobody with any common sense wants to be in the position of a project manager. But who are we to say?

After all, you know best. You are a project manager or project leader. Or, even worse, you will shortly be one. In any case, after six days at the earliest and one year at the latest, most project managers are completely frustrated with their job. Too much pressure, too much rush, too little proper recognition. Despite all this, some project managers wouldn’t change their job for the world.

They will say: There is nothing more wonderful than a project. A project is like your own baby. You see it grow and flourish. You fill others with enthusiasm, you motivate people and you identify with the project in such a way that is barely possible with your daily business and regular work. You love project work because it has so little to do with routine. Every day, practically everything is new and exciting, and experienced project managers relish the thought of facing the unpredictable. Project management is a constant challenge and always brings a sense of achievement—that is, when you tackle it correctly.

How to tackle it correctly is something we have shown to more than 5,000 project leaders and project managers in training, consultation and process monitoring sessions over the last fifteen years. They have all experienced more than enough project frustration. Many have managed to turn a frustrating job into an enjoyable one that has brought them recognition and often significantly accelerated their careers. Some managed a spectacular turnaround; others improved their situation in smaller steps. No matter which goal you have set yourself, it can only get better. Throughout this book we will help you get there.

The unfortunate senior manager

We will also help you if you feel the above scenario refers to you only indirectly. You are a senior manager and the project manager is one of your staff. As a matter of fact, you thought that project management provided the solution to all problems, such as winning that important customer or implementing an important project, despite having no spare capacity and minimal budgetary scope. But somehow it never worked out like that.

Projects interfere with the regular line of work and even if they manage to be on time, they are finished right at the last minute, never to the agreed specifications, and are immensely time-consuming. In any case, they cost more time than you can spare.

The problem doesn’t lie in project management itself. It has more to do with the fact that you have a lot of project, but not enough management. In the following chapters, you will discover how to turn this situation around.

The project manager’s four frustration factors

How do you become a project manager? The boss summons you and says, I have a problem here. And you are just the person to take care of it. Off you go! Inflated with pride, you leave the boss’s office and say to yourself, I’m now a project leader! The pride might last two minutes. More accurately, it lasts exactly the length of time it takes you to return to your desk.

You sit at your desk and ask yourself, What did the boss just say? The longer you think about it, the less clear your tasks, project goals and scope become. With every passing minute spent thinking about it, the frustration grows. And there are good reasons for this:

Frustration factor 1: Unclear goals. You ask yourself, "What are the actual goals for the project? The boss didn’t seem to tell you in concrete terms. They said something about innovative, fast and pioneering, but this is anything but crystal clear! And anyway—what will the project actually do for the company? Isn’t it a rather political" project?

Frustration factor 2: Tight budget and deadline. Naturally, everything has to be done as soon as possible and should cost next to nothing. Do the bosses know what they are saying? This can’t be what they mean!

Frustration factor 3: No cooperation. With an uneasy feeling you think, Oh my God, I’ll never manage this on my own! I’ll need the support of so many other departments in the company. But how can I get that to work? Each department here is a company within a company and hardly anyone cooperates with anyone else. On top of that, I have no disciplinary authority. Like it or not, I’m at the complete mercy of senior management.

Frustration factor 4: I feel completely overstretched! The project initiator mentioned innovation and challenge, but how does this work in concrete terms? How do I foster innovation? Where do I begin? What is my first step, what is my second step, and how can I proceed so that I don’t take the second step before the first and fall flat on my face?

All these things race through the mind of a project manager shortly after the assignment of the project, and then panic sets in. If you are an experienced project manager, the panic no longer grows to excessive proportions, but it is still there, even for old hands, at the start of every new project, because the four frustration factors arise regardless of how experienced you are. Before each new project, you stand there and ask yourself, "How can my boss do this to me? How am I supposed to work accurately with such unclear parameters? Are they doing this on purpose? Do they really want to hang me out to dry?" No, of course they don’t.

Advice for senior managers: Ease project frustration

Naturally, as the senior manager responsible for initiating the project, you don’t want to allow your project manager to burn out. You are on the board of directors, are perhaps the managing director, department or field leader and have much better things to do than wear down your own human resources. You have no capacity and hardly any budget available, but you absolutely have to win this customer or develop that product because the market demands it. Therefore, you call in a competent employee and make him or her your project manager.

Frustration factor 1: Unclear goals. It’s not your fault that the project manager is muttering to himself and complaining about unclear goals. After all, the seed of any great idea is the final vision. If you had to inform your project manager of every minute detail, you might as well plan the project yourself.

Frustration factor 2: Tight budget and deadline. Of course everything has to be done yesterday—the competition doesn’t wait! And naturally, you would love to make a healthy budget available to your project manager. But it is the middle of the year, the annual budget is allocated and there is no chance of obtaining supplementary financial resources.

Frustration factor 3: No cooperation. Well, this is the factor you can influence the least. What’s more, it is not your primary interest because the responsibility for cooperation between individual sections lies with the project manager, doesn’t it?

So you are not to blame if your project manager is sitting at her desk, brooding over the task she believes you have just deliberately and malignly landed her with. Of course you haven’t! But that’s not the point. Your newly appointed project manager is frustrated after only 120 seconds into the start of the project. And frustrated people don’t perform well. You have no time to spoon-feed the project in every last detail. But you could offer a little support. Then the project manager will work more productively and the project will run more quickly, which in turn will reflect positively on you. It pays to lead your project manager well. So take care to establish clear conditions right from the assignment of the project. How you can do this is explained in Chapter 2.

The project manager’s futile search

Meanwhile, the project manager searches, rather despairingly, for backup. They stock up on books and sign up for a project management seminar.

For their efforts they are rewarded with:

- Bar charts,

- Network diagrams,

- PC tools,

- Documentation tools,

- Critical path methods and a plethora of management jargon.

The seminar overwhelms you with project management terminology. The project management trainer displays 200 transparencies in a day. The whole rigmarole does enlighten the project managers to a degree, but after each seminar and every book they ask themselves, So what should I do now?

If the senior manager wants to be even more generous and helpful, they provide, possibly at huge expense, project software, which will remain unused and sit collecting dust on the ungrateful project manager’s desk. Then they need weeks for training but have no time! Whatever the project manager searches for, however many seminars they visit and books they pore over, they don’t ever feel fully prepared. What will really help?

2 Project assignment: The initial planning

Frustration factor 1: Unclear goals

You have just been assigned your project. And now you’re consumed by frustration due to the reasons we have just looked at. Is there anything you can do about this frustration? Of course there is. Everybody is given the project they deserve. So if the boss summons you and you don’t even attempt to clarify the unclear project goals, what else can you expect? So make yourself heard. But not along the lines of, Look, that’s just hopelessly vague and won’t work. This will only make your boss see red, and an angry boss won’t help in making your project goals any clearer. Therefore, ask in a way that will produce a useful answer. Perhaps like this:

All I want is to do a good job. You have just touched briefly on the goals. But for me, this and this are still unclear. Who can I discuss it with?

If you don’t ask, how is your boss supposed to know that something is unclear to you? After all, they are not mind readers. If you ask, then they will answer your questions—albeit sometimes impatiently—or at least tell you where you can get the detailed information: Ask our development leader—he’ll definitely know! You should not be satisfied with anything less than a source of information.

Advice for senior managers: Clarify awkward questions

If you, the senior manager, have a project manager who asks you awkward questions, you should consider yourself fortunate, because thanks to their pertinent enquiries regarding the project assignment you can see that you:

- were possibly given unclear goals by your own manager, and

- haven’t considered the project aims to your usual thorough standard.

There is a myth concerning project management, which takes in a number of senior managers: When everything is at a standstill, when there is no time, no money and no personnel available for an important contract, then you quickly whistle for a project manager and everything will be back on track. Anyone taken in by this can reckon on the project falling flat on its face with a resounding crash.

Exactly the opposite of this myth is true. Whoever simply summons a project manager, unloads the project and returns to their daily business can be sure that something will go wrong. Only inexperienced managers take on a project without a degree of resistance. Good project managers ask awkward questions, for example concerning unclear goals.

Senior managers with project experience, that is to say senior managers whose projects run on time and, above all, on budget, expect awkward questions from their project managers. Premier league managers go a step further. They train their project managers to ask awkward questions, because they know the project manager is only as good as their training. Meanwhile, world-class managers go the final step and anticipate the project