A dying project isn’t like dying patient, with conveniently shrill machinery, beeping alarms, and George Clooney dashing in to save the day before going on to a Hollywood career. There are cases of catastrophic failure, but most failed online projects don’t burn out – they fade away.
There are a lot of warning signs, some specific to working with online employees or web-based projects, and learning to recognize them can save everyone involved a huge amount of trouble, time and money. And as project manager, that’s your job. Here we look at four danger signs, and how web-based task tools can help you defuse them:
1. Ballooning Features
When someone’s trying to make things better and better, they either have great motivation or know what’s there isn’t nearly good enough. If the upper echelons recommend some intelligent additions, great – that’s exactly how you improve. But if they’re constantly demanding upgrades which require major overhauls and (most alarmingly) not following up on requests for previous changes, it’s usually because they know that as things stand the project is a bust.
How To Recognize: The Qtask Discussions tab tracks all communications, allowing you to keep track of how often new feature requests are added as well as how many new tasks are created.
How To Avoid: Any project worth the name has a spec sheet, an initial document recording exactly what the result’s meant to be. Make sure everyone has access to it (or even add a Wiki page to the project so everyone can keep it clear), and then compare all new requests to this original spec sheet.
Protip – To make it easier to compare: In a given project, you can create a Forum named “Feature Requests” and gather all the wishes and expectations in one single place. It is how we do it our-selves at Qtask.
2. Blamethrowers
While the online project manager is trying to get things done, others are actively covering their asses. Every request is met with excuses, forwards, or references to other people – as the sinking ship’s rats desperately plant paper trails implicating others in errors that ended the project.
How To Recognize: In addition to the Discussion tool mentioned before, make sure to follow up standard status requests with an inquiry into “Problems” or “Reasons For Delay” via regular status meetings. Often you will get genuine information, and useful ammunition for improving progress, but when people start writing each other’s names in there it’s time to be worried and dig deeper.
How To Avoid: The Tasks tab tracks who is responsible for what – and the recipient has to acknowledge receipt, putting a permanent end to “I didn’t know/X didn’t tell me” troubles. Use the project Calendar to keep online employees on track with milestones, which are also tracked via adding due dates to Tasks that also can be shown on the Calendar, and encourage team members to post an alert ASAP regarding slipping timelines.
Protip – Use the Compliance tool to ask weekly questions like “Do you have anything you need to complete your tasks on time?”.
3. Lack Of Response
The death knell of many online projects, and the nightmare of all online project managers – because even if things weren’t doomed, if everyone evaporates then surely they are. Even the best web-based task tools only work if people stay connected (and aren’t ignoring your attempts to get in touch). If people stop responding, it could be that they’ve just lost hope in the project and are pouring their time into other priorities (particularly if they’re multitasking freelancers).
How To Recognize: It can be trickier than you think to spot absentee employees when you’re managing many across multiple projects. Use the Calendar to set for yourself regular check dates, Discussions to track the last time they checked in (also, in Qtask, if you hover over a user’s avatar you can see when they last logged in), and incomplete Tasks will tell you if they start missing deadlines.
In Qtask, you can also run a search on Discussions with the name of the person as a Doer. This will give you that persons posts chronologically organized, providing you with a sense of that person’s activity. This type of search can be run on Files and Wikis also. Alternatively, you can run a Time Sheet report on the person to see how many hours he or she has input the last week or month and compare with previous activity.
How To Avoid: People only bail because they think the ship is sinking and don’t feel accountable. If you keep things on track and, more importantly, keep people in the loop about how you deal with the inevitable problems with regular direct communications, you’ll inspire more confidence, motivation and keep people around.
Your Sinking Projects
Do you have any stories of sinking projects? What do you wish you’d recognized as a warning sign when you were new to project management? Which do you think is the single most factor that contributes towards the death of a project? Please post your ideas, questions or comments below or on FaceBook or Twitter. Thanks!
I think the problem of ballooning features is a symptom of poorly defined requirements.
A project manager may ask the team to deliver “a car”, but fail to adequately define whether the vision for the car is a sports car or a truck. Once the outlines of what is actually being built become clear, it’s usually pretty late in the schedule, and lots of time gets wasted redoing work that wouldn’t have been done if a more detailed specification had been written up front.
Comment by Abe — August 27, 2009 @ 8:31 pm
Unfortunately I’ve run into all of these. One similar one to “ballooning features” is “feature creep” A lot of times this is done by the “doers” of something. “Hey this would be a simple thing to add,” they say. Often times this causes other “features” to be requested or added, leading to full on ballooning features that are not really needed and probably confuse things. These are sometime really hard to spot before it is too late.
Strong well defined tasks are one way to avoid this, as well as spotting them early on and getting things back on track.
Comment by Will — August 30, 2009 @ 5:14 am
I think slow sinking projects are not caused by ballooning features or blame throwing both of which are symptoms after the fact. Sinking projects, in my universe are simply those projects which fail to meet a deadline, are caused by neglect or lack of communication or leadership. The project managers must work together to agree upon the goal, feature set, and bring a team together to accomplish that goal. If you have a ballooning feature situation, the project manager’s role is to sound the alarm.
Lack of Response is far a far greater symptom from my point of view. Lack of response tells me that your project is either not a priority, that person is just too busy, or just doesn’t care. Any of which can doom a project. The best example is the person who constantly uses the “I didn’t get the email” excuse. We all have heard that one…
Comment by Jim — August 31, 2009 @ 6:34 pm