1. Discuss an article from a recent Project Management journal or publication, such as the Project Management Journal Please read this article and write 2 pages discussion. https://www.pmi.org/learning/library/shared-leadership-virtual-team-10058 Original post only! Be sure to check both grammar and spelling as mistakes will result in a loss of points. 2. Go though this article and reply to their posting, adding value and promoting discussion or further thought on the topic 100-150words . http://www.business2community.com/marketing/pm-horror-storiesproject-management-disasters-can-learn-01945274#scJbHgCvqq4ikpDl.97 Four Project Management Disasters and How to Avoid Them This article comes at quite a relevant time to read as a young professional beginning to take on roles in projects, particularly as I have just begun to lead my first long-term project in my job. I have made many group project mistakes in the past but have learned how valuable the lessons received from these mistakes may be in future endeavors. This article sums up several of the predicaments in which many new project managers suddenly find themselves and warns how to protect an organization from these major project mishaps. One of the biggest mistakes in project management occurring today is the miscommunication between consultants and internal employees. Management coaching and consultation is a gigantic business in the world today, especially with the explosion of ecommerce and world-wide company collaborations. Personally, I have experienced this project failure from both perspectives: the contractor and the internal representative. As a contractor, language differs from the industry often and messages may become mixed. Contractors usually find the action items needed in a project that must be carried out by the internal employees but have little to no authority to see these action items through. Therefore, the contractor must learn to develop close, trusting relationships with managers and supervisors and persuade them to motivate their employees to fulfill these tasks, or they must inherit some sort of authority from the contract deliverable. Otherwise, lack of communication may prolong the project, costing the organization unnecessary time, effort, and money while damaging the relationship between the consultant and the internal employees. The second major project issue is the project charter itself; someone in the company had a seemingly great idea and several employees jumped on board. But as the charter was established and the budget was designed, members of the team realize that the organization may not be ready or able to fulfill the goals and deliverables of the project. Out of fear or apathy, no employee wants to speak up against the project manager and sponsor. Therefore, the poorly planned project proceeds and eventually fails, costing the organization valuable money and possibly personnel, or the project's success does not fulfill the deliverables and is not sustainable. As a project manager and sponsor, empowering team members and subject matter experts to speak their opinions and thoughts early in project initiation stage may help eliminate this issue, as well as stimulate innovative ideas and solutions during the project planning and execution stages. Another issue revolves once again around communication - or the lack thereof. Nothing is worse than team members who do not communicate, and a project is doomed if the manager or sponsor does not answer questions, email, phone calls, or lead project update meetings. Without communication, deadlines cannot be met, issues cannot be fixed, and morale may suffer greatly. There is very little recovery from lack of communication in initiation and planning stages of project management. To protect a team from this, a project manager should develop strong skills of communication, host project update meetings often, encourage two-way communication and a feedback loop, and utilize a system to "centralize communications and ensure that everyone is held accountable for providing information when it is requested" (Conrad, 2017). The last and arguably worst project management disaster occurs when customer relationships and arrangements are not clear. Many companies sign off on projects specifically for a foreign office or a department, but decision-making power still rests at the top of the organizational structure. In the worst cases, the customer's parent organization must allow resource allocation and decisions to occur at the foreign office, who must then communicate and allow decisions to be made at the department level, who then are responsible for relaying that message to the project team. This convoluted communication line can cause major backups in meeting project timelines and may end like the famous child's game "Telephone"; by the time the message is relayed down the line from department to department, the message may be missing valuable bits and pieces of information and may cause serious project issues in the execution phase. All of these project management disasters can be avoided fairly simply. But in the case a project team may find itself battling these issues, the best remedy starts by calling an immediate project team meeting to openly discuss the issues and design a plan of action to move forward. By proactively discussing issues and planning for delays, a project manager may keep communication lines open with both employees and customers and can empower team members to speak their ideas and opinions. 3. Go though this article and reply to their posting, adding value and promoting discussion or further thought on the topic 100-150words . https://www.journalofaccountancy.com/issues/2017/apr/importance-of-killingprojects.html In the article “The importance of killing projects” (Amato, 2017) writes about how killing a project is not a failure, but failing to kill a project when it should be killed would be a failure. This importance of understanding when to stop a project really can’t be overstated. I believe this because data from Product Development Institute (PDI) shows that stronger performing companies are far more likely to stop a project before it is launched and that the weaker performing companies have a much higherrate of project failures (Amato, 2017). This can be for many reasons, but one is likely that strong performers tend to have more effective real-time monitoring of projects which helps to discover when a project needs to be killed or if it should continue. There are several obstacles that get in the way of effectively monitoring a project and in turn lead to failure instead of the success of killing wasted projects. The "Ego" of a project leader is a key factor. "No one wants to fail, " and if a project was your idea, it might be tough to admit to being wrong. Another obstacle is "Ownership." Individuals and teams work on projects for long periods of time and have invested a lot of themselves into the project. This ownership can hinder making the right decision to kill a project. Feelings are a human condition that affects our decision making, and in this case, they can cause failure. Ownership of a project does not help in objective decision making, but instead leads to subjective decisions which must be balanced by outside influence on a project is important in this case (Amato, 2017). The momentum and inertia of a project is another obstacle. The obstacle is in effect as projects get moving and are close to finishing. People naturally will want to finish the project even if everything suggests that it shouldn't be. Culture is also an obstacle as those organizations who have a propensity to accept risk are also willing to accept failure. The last obstacle is sunk cost which is money already spent on the project. The reality is a project should continue not based off what has already been spent, but instead on what future value it holds. These obstacles can be overcome an organization put forward a plan to monitor projects. As mentioned before the PDI researched this area and they discovered that "85% of top performers employ specific criteria related to continuing or killing a project." (Amato, 2017) One practice to have for projects is to include a "devil advocate" on the team. This individual will focus on looking for a reason the project will fail and so on.
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