Donna FitzgeraldDoug DeCarlo (the author of Extreme Project Management) has an interesting concept he calls project imperatives. A project imperative is the thing or things that will cause the PM’s head to be loped off if he or she fails to deliver. Since good PMs are hard to come by I like the idea of making sure they understand that there are three things they need to do in order to survive.
1. Understand the capabilities that the project must enable in order to achieve business value (what Glen Alleman calls “getting to done” in his herding cats blog)
2. Successfully deliver on the “required” critical success factors. A CFS in this context is always related to something that needs to be done to comply with the prevailing politics of the organization. As a CIO I worked for early in my career used to caution, there are always things that are correct even if they aren’t necessarily right.
3. Make sure that their project team would both work for them again and/or tell others that it’s safe to work for them.
Obviously as imperatives go these three concepts are fairly simple but I can attest from experience they aren’t easy. If you are looking for something to discuss at your weekly PM community of practice meeting you might consider any and all of these topics.
Category: PMO Tags: critical success factors, Project Management
2 responses so far ↓
1 Doug DeCarlo March 18, 2009 at 4:13 pm
Here’s some more information on Project Imperatives and how they are used …
Pick a project that you are now working on…any one. Ask yourself, “What are the handful of things that must go right for this project to succeed, and if they don’t the project will be considered a failure?”
Project imperatives reflect the critical success factors peculiar to the mission of the project at hand. For instance, in Noah’s ark project, Noah and family were to build an ark before the sudden and torrential flood came in nine months. Their mission statement (AKA “The Project Skinny” in eXtreme project management) might have read like this:
Noah and family will build an ark for the chosen ones. Our project will be considered complete when the ark is built and leaves the dock. This project supports the Sponsor’s objective to start over with a new team.
After a vigorous discussion, the Ark team may have come up with these project imperatives:
· On time
· Seaworthy
· Big enough
· Fully Loaded
Everyone on the project team should be able to rattle off the project’s imperatives as quickly as if you asked them their name and address. Yet, when you bring up the question to project managers and team members, you typically witness a vacant stare followed by a lot of mental scrambling and verbal fumbling.
A reality with just about any project is that there are hundreds of things that come at you, yet there is simply not enough time to deal with everything. You have to duck some things. A major benefit of knowing your project imperatives cold is to use them as a filter to focus everyone’s attention so that they can make decisions in the line of fire. That is, anything that has a direct impact on the success or failure of the project is a priority … something to cause you throw yourself over the railroad tracks. And, without knowing one’s Imperatives, it’s easy to fight the wrong battle. (Get off track?) Project Imperatives also serve as a basis to establish critical project metrics as well as a foundation for planning and mitigating risks.
2 Donna Fitzgerald March 18, 2009 at 4:23 pm
What struck me about Doug’s advice is the wisdom of the statement
“And, without knowing one’s Imperatives, it’s easy to fight the wrong battle.”
Whether you call them project imperatives or critical success factors the trick is understanding the political consequences of actions and decisions made on a project. Sometimes it’s just as easy to figure out how to make a stakeholder happy as it is to fight the battle to tell them no. Understanding where the line is on this issue while still keeping a project on time and on budget is the fast track to professional sucess