You see, most people equate collaboration with meetings and committees. And we all know how we feel about meetings (and potentially committees…I see you nodding and smiling over there…yea…you).

Why do some teams work as teams, and others get stuck in full committee mode?

See, you can set up all the right framework for collaboration. You can have the space (with adequate whiteboards of course), you can have the ground rules (you know, brainstorming rules etc.), you can have a kick-butt facilitator, you can have a clear goal – all of the things that are of vital importance to collaboration…and still not have collaboration!

Why? I have a theory.

Collaboration, true collaboration, requires people who are willing to set aside personal role, ego and stake in order to accomplish the goal. It requires that the people on the team be firmly of a single mind that the goal will be met – no matter what. There is no thought on a truly collaborative team that it “can’t” or “won’t” be done.

I’m part of a team that works like this. Sure, each of us have our extra special talents that we bring to the team – but when we collaborate as part of the team, we shed those “official roles” and simply become people. I’m just Bevin on my team, instead of “Bevin the PM”. Christina is just Christina on the team, and not “Christina the Writer”. Tara is just Tara not “Tara the Artist”. In fact, I would truly like to shed my organizational title – because that title implies a box. I don’t want a box. I don’t want to “know my place in the hierarchy”. Heck, I don’t want to “know my place” at all.

We *all* contribute to each part. We bandy about ideas, pick up the slack for each other when things arise, we “make things” together.

It’s hard to describe to anyone the magic that happens in this type of collaborative team. When asked what I do as part of the team, it’s hard to answer…because it’s a little bit of everything…as well it should be.

People want to replicate it – understandably so.

So I’ve created a recipe for a collaborative team…not as tasty, perhaps, as Grandma’s cranberry relish…but with infinitely better results:

True Collaboration

serves as many as necessary per the goal

3-8 motivated people willing to work without ego or self-interest

1 clear and concise goal

3 heaping cups of passion

3 cups of commitment to the goal and to finding a way that everyone agrees with

1 good organizational champion

Optional: dashes of truly inspiring music

Mix in room with whiteboards. Facilitation may be necessary at first, but be sure to remove in later stages or else collaboration will be stunted. When the team starts using phrases like “No matter the risk, we are in this together”, you’ll know it’s reached a stage of maturity where anything can be accomplished. Nurture and protect.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone….

You see, while we’ve been talking about the way the Enterprise should be, in order to make things work, what people have actually been hearing is that Enterprise 1.0 is inherently bad and evil.

This is not the case.

I am reminded of the Baka tribe in Central Africa. Their culture is strong, easily identifiable and has worked well for them for centuries.

However, the Baka are now endangered. The rainforests that they depend upon for their food and medicine are disappearing due to deforestation. The neighboring Bantu tribe, an agricultural community, often takes advantage of the Baka because they don’t understand the value of paper money.

The Baka are in danger of becoming extinct, they face a true threat to their way of life.

There are several options facing the Baka.

The first is to rally for more resources, more money to save the rainforests, to protect them from the Bantu. We know that this approach doesn’t work (if it did, there would be no need for the myriad of save the rainforest organizations out there, and we would still have the dodo bird)

The second is to let things happen as they will. As the rainforests diminish, the quality of life of the Baka will degrade. The children of the Baka tribe, tired of the poverty, will eventually leave, enticed by the material goods of the Bantu. And soon, the Baka will be no longer, another forgotten tribe in humankind’s history.

The third is to find ways for the Baka to survive while ADAPTING to their new circumstances. Perhaps there are ways of teaching the Baka how to adapt to paper money, how to integrate hunting with agriculture, all while still retaining those things that make the Baka unique.

Now, given that the Baka MUST change as a result of circumstances changing, would anyone say that the Baka have been inherently bad? That their way of life is wrong? Certainly not, it worked for them for hundreds of years; it would be ridiculous to suggest it.

But change, they must, because circumstances simply demand it.

I see this as a direct parallel to what those of us who are attempting to nudge Enterprises toward a 2.0 model of culture are saying. We are trying to find that third option for our organizations as we see the circumstances around us changing. We do not want extinction for our organizations nor are we saying that the model that has served us well since the industrial revolution is inherently bad.

It’s just insufficient to help us move forward with the changed circumstances.  Like the Baka, we must adapt to this change or face extinction.

It’s as simple as that.

I’m a part of a team that is looking at Social Media Marketing. Now, that name alone bugs me, so we changed it to the Conversation Marketing Team – but that’s neither here nor there. Essentially, I’m inundated every day with information about social media, and how you can leverage it to promote your organization and drive revenue. Every day, more links cross my desk, more tweets come through my TweetDeck, and more webinar invitations come through my email.

But there’s a piece that is being missed here. A critical piece.

Social media has a potential that I’m not sure everyone is acknowledging.

Think of your organization like an onion. Onions have layers (as do parfaits, but that’s a conversation for a different day).

The first layer, the skin, is currently what everyone sees. It’s the image of your company as your PR department tells it. It’s the image of your company as the Marketing department illustrates it.

Social media peels back that layer quickly and deftly like a peeler’s knife. If your products and services aren’t what is advertised, people now have the ability to discuss and discover that with each other. All of a sudden, if you’re not paying attention, you’re in defense mode, trying to save a brand that has been damaged (often by the truth).

The next layers are the organization as your executive team views it. You know, those wonderful mission, vision and values statements. The image of your organization as a professional, dynamic place where employees work away diligently and happily. Yet one disgruntled employee’s tweet, disgusting or disturbing video and all of a sudden the core of the onion shows up.

Your organizational culture. The truth about your products and services. The truth about how you treat your customers, partners and employees.

Wow. And…er…ouch.

For those of us whose job historically has been to polish a turd (more poop talk, sorry – and I’m not saying that’s been my job – we know who we are), all of a sudden people have the ability to see it for what it is. And no amount of marketing or PR defense will fix that. It becomes imperative that you actually FIX the problems and issues.  It’s already been proven that it can’t be stopped. Look at what happened during the Iran election. Look at what’s happening in China. Look at what happens when organizations large and small try to squelch the flow and stem the tide.

As I see it, organizations have two choices right now.

One is to take a brutally honest inventory of where they are at. To stop insincere, inauthentic conversations. To stop treating employees like children and start treating them like the adults they are. To fix problems in their customer service centers, product development and organizational culture. To acknowledge that they might not be perfect now, but they are making steps to become a better organization every day.

The other is to hide their heads in the sand.

Either way, the tide is coming. Everyone is coming. And you can choose to peel your own onion, or wait until everyone does it for you. But be aware, if everyone does it for you, you may become chopped onion, and end up cooked.

What strikes me about many organizations is that they just don’t get it.

It’s not about technology. I mean, sure, it’s been facilitated using technology, but it’s not ABOUT technology.

So that’s the first point that people who don’t get it generally…erm…don’t get.

It doesn’t matter the platform – whether it be twitter, facebook, myspace, Ning – it is platform independent. What it IS about is the people (hence the “social” word here).

I’m going to veer left in this conversation a little and talk a little bit about excrement here, so if poop talk bothers you then please skip this post and go somewhere else. I’m an avid twitter user (I have tweets sent to my cell phone as texts so I can keep up and tweet wherever I am) and I’m also an animal owner. I have two dobermans, lovely dogs, whom I had just switched from one brand of food that was causing them some digestive upsets, to another.  I found that this second brand was working out much better for their stomachs, but was causing an increase in the amount of poop, so, I tweeted.

“Liking eukanuba for the quality of…erm…output. Not liking eukanuba for the quantity.”

A lovely staffer at Eukanuba picked up on my tweet right away and wrote back. She wrote:

“Hi! I work for Eukanuba. Is there anything I can do to help?“

Was I unhappy enough to call the company and complain? No. I was simply noticing that I had an issue now with quantity of poo. Pre-twitter I may have mentioned that to my friends, emailed about it to my mother, wrote about it in my diary and spoken about it at a cocktail party (although, it’s not likely).

But now I had a friend at Eukanuba. I responded to her tweet that I was just surprised at the quantity but overall I had been happy with the food. She gave me a 1-800 number to call, and let me know that if there was anything that they could do to just let them know.

All of a sudden *I* mattered as a consumer.

Contrast that with an experience I had the other day with Citimortgage. I wanted to change the date of my payment on my loan. I’m a busy person, and when I finally got time to call, I didn’t have my loan number with me. In this day and age of computers, I called anyway, knowing that answering a few questions would help them find me. So, I tried to go through the automated system (15 minutes of frustration), then finally reached a person….who asked me the same questions that the automated system did.

They said they couldn’t do it, but maybe another department could. I got passed to the other department, answered the same questions, and they informed me that they couldn’t do it, but that I might have to refinance my loan (seriously? to change a payment date??).

So I got passed to that department, answered the same questions, who then said “no, you don’t have to refinance your loan, let me get you to your loan representative”.

Spoke with the loan representative who said “Why did they send you over here?” and she (after discussing with her how long and arduous this process had already been) introduced me to yet someone else at Citimortgage. After answering the same questions AGAIN, they couldn’t find me in the system, and determined that I would have to get my loan number and call back. And hung up.

What a great customer service experience. Ahem.

So, I tweeted about it. Citimortgage either isn’t in the twitter world, or doesn’t care. Many other people also tweeted about their experiences. If I had wanted to take it further (and I just might) I might start a hashtag such as #citimortgagesucks or #ihatecitimortgage, to find likeminded people who also have had experiences such as mine (or worse!). And all together, we could tackle the walls of citimortgage and take them down (only partially kidding) like Goliath.

Citimortgage didn’t respond. Didn’t ask if I needed help, didn’t give me a number to actually call to get a person who could help me.

Now, I’m actually motivated to refinance my house JUST so that I can get away from Citimortgage. And I found a bunch of like minded people, who want to also leave Citimortgage now.

Ouch.

Think about your organization – higher ed isn’t immune, no one is. Are your products and services good enough to stand behind?

Are you willing to listen to people when they tell you what is wrong?

If not, you’re going to be in trouble, fast. It’s no longer enough to be a “big name”. Press releases full of fancy careful wording will no longer help smooth over trouble. To use an analogy, that’s like the guy at the cocktail party standing in the corner all puffed up and full of himself who never listens to anyone. Don’t be that guy!

The conversations are already going on. Whether you like it or not. Whether you are open to it, or not.

Social Media is just like a cocktail party. Only, it’s a free cocktail party. Everyone is invited. And that means you, too.

Then I watched a video from Ragan communications about email etiquette, and realized that there’s a culture clash going on. Or maybe a generational clash. Or maybe an ideological clash, I really don’t know.

It’s not just about “not just using textspeak” in an email. It’s about the fact that once upon a time, there was this thing called “professionalism”. Professionalism was the strict separation of personality from work. When you wrote, it was supposed to be impersonal, cold, “professional”. It could share no aspects of your personality – mood – what you were feeling that day.

It extends beyond email, to internal communications that come from…well…from wherever they come from. How often do you get communications from your higher ups? If you’re in a small organization, they probably include some informal language “I think” “I feel” “I would like to”.

But if you’re in a large organization, the language starts to become more formal, and more impersonal. “We feel that” (and you know the “We” that they are talking about is the organization as a whole).

What does that do to impede communication and trust?

Well, immediately my BS-o-meter comes out, and I see those types of messages as being heavily scripted. A flurry of professional writers and communicators, massaging that message until all traces of the CEO/CIO/C-whatever O’s personality is stamped out but it communicates that “Royal We” that means the organization is paramount. The organization becomes “the thing that is doing this”.

I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t inspire trust in me.

Now, I’m not saying that communication should be full of grammatical errors, poor spelling, lolspeak or l33tspeak, but what I’m saying is that having a human voice MEANS something – particularly around trust.

I think about the Dominos blowup regarding that god-awful youtube video, and the ensuing video that was posted by Dominos leadership. A few things stick out – he doesn’t look at the camera, for one, but another thing it’s all about what Dominos is sorry for. “We”. Almost like he’s hiding behind the organizational We and giving me a generic message about how We are sorry.

Not what I want to hear as a consumer. It’s better than nothing, but still does not inspire trust in me (as witnessed by my trashing Dominos coupons as opposed to clipping them last night). What did *I* want to hear?

Well, I wanted to hear the CEO OWN it. *I* screwed up. *I* didn’t ensure that there were hiring practices and training practices in place that would prevent such issues. I wanted to hear what HE was going to do to transform his organization into one where employees weren’t hanging out in the store unattended long enough to make such a video. Where employees were selected that had as much passion for the pizza and the brand as possible. Those employees are out there, trust me.

I didn’t want to hear engineered language.

It’s kind of like receiving a rote apology – you know, someone wrongs you in some way and writes you an apology note that has clearly come from the internet or been edited by his Grandma. You know it’s wrong, because it’s not in HIS voice. It’s not from the heart. It’s not honest. And man, an insincere apology is just rubbing salt in the wound.

But when I talk to some of my colleagues of a different generation, that’s what they want to hear. They want things to be “professional”. Reminds me of a story my husband told me about his father, who worked in a nickel smelting mill. I guess every day he would wear a suit to work, change into work clothes, work, change back into his suit and head home.

Odd behavior, in my mind, but it was about “professional”.

It seems that’s the culture clash. I want to know what my CEO or VP’s habits are, good, bad or indifferent. I want him to talk to ME as an employee, and I don’t want his words coming from someone else. I want him to be open and candid, and not talk to me about the organization as if it were this third being that spoke. Kind of a creepy concept, really, almost like the buildings themselves speaking (which, if anyone knows about our building issues right now, isn’t out of the question).

I want to know that he puts his pants on one leg at a time, just like I do, and that he makes mistakes sometimes. What qualifies him to lead ME is not his perfection, but rather his ability to strategize. His ability to see forward that has obviously served him well. His ability to look me in the eye and candidly give me wisdom.

He can only do that if HE speaks to me, not the buildings.

I don’t know, what do you think?

(Please note that I’m using the term He because my current leadership happens to be male. If my current leadership were female, I’d use she. Just so that you know.)

So, I stumbled upon the 2009 Edelman Trust Barometer. According to the site, they surveyed 4,475 opinion leaders in two age groups (25-34 and 35-64) in 20 countries. All opinion leaders met the following criteria:

• College educated
• Household income in the top quartile for their age in their country
• Read or watch business/news media at least several times a week
• Follow public policy issues in the news at least several times a week

Now, I have no idea what an opinion leader actually is, but I get the rest of it. The report indicated that trust in government and business is down in recent years, particularly since last year.

You can’t trust someone who is holding back the cards (so to speak). Organizations are the same way, both inside and out. We (as people) have learned that we can no longer trust the “official published word” from business or government. We’ve been betrayed by banks, by insurance companies, by automakers, by policymakers.

Of course, this carries over into all of our interactions. Do we trust the people that we work with? Do we trust our leadership? How does the organization regain (or gain) trust? How do *I* fit in with the trust model?

The remedy that this paper suggests, that the popularity of social media suggests and that The Cluetrain Manifesto (one of my favorite pieces of work right now) is that Transparency is the key.

Transparency is scary! Transparency is pure, it’s raw, it’s scary. Transparency can be ugly, can expose personal agendas and all that organizational crud that you store in the back room. Transparency takes your organization and puts a really big magnifying glass on it and exposes everything, the good, the bad and the ugly.

At the same time, Transparency is absolutely critical. One cannot have trust without Transparency.

Think about it. In your personal life, do you trust people that you know don’t or won’t disclose things to you?

My guess is, no.

So how do we develop trust in the organization?

I’ll say it again, Transparency.

The thing is, Transparency isn’t solely the job of leadership and decisionmakers.

If you think of the organization as a relationship, you can’t have trust unless both people are transparent.

Trust and Transparency are a contract between people – you are going to tell me things honestly and then in return, I will tell you things honestly.

It’s up to each and every one of us to be honest and open. It’s up to people at every level in the organization to be honest and open and Transparent.

What can you do to foster Transparency in your organization?

Why am I ruminating on this this morning? Well, we just completed a very succesful (in my estimation) project here at Penn State Outreach. It was a tough, time-compressed project, with a very widely visible launch (for more information, see ThoughtFarmer’s great blog post at http://www.thoughtfarmer.com/blog/2009/02/04/pennstate/). Traditional waterfall, spiral or other methodologies just wouldn’t have worked in this case. Why?

Well, maybe I can start with a little bit of background on the project.

Penn State Outreach is a widely diverse organization, about 1500 people strong. When I say widely diverse, I don’t mean just the standard HR definition of diversity (although we are that as well) but rather diverse because of the focuses of the internal units. Penn State Outreach does everything from television and radio broadcasting (WPSU), to 4H programs, workforce development, continuing education, non-traditional learners, small business development, community environmental center and more. As you can imagine, these Units all have their own goals, their own focus, and their own culture – very diverse. What connects us all is the mission of Outreach, which is eloquently stated in our mission statement, “Outreach serves as a catalyst, collaborator, and connector to meet the needs of our various constituents and stakeholders with the programs, research, and services of Penn State.” In a nutshell, to connect the community in Pennsylvania and beyond with Penn State University. This is, by the way, where I am currently employed (and all opinions expressed herein are mine and do not necessarily reflect the views of Penn State Outreach or Penn State University – standard disclaimer)

About 2 1/2, maybe 3 years ago now, a team got together to discuss internal communication in Outreach. The results of their findings (the process is documented here http://communicationinsider.com/ ) indicated that one way we were really lacking was in communicating with the organization as a whole. We did have an Intranet already, but it wasn’t widely used, and people generally only used it to manage email groups and to check their email. I wasn’t there for the Intranet 1.0 project,  so I can’t tell you exactly what happened with it, but I can say that it wasn’t used and wasn’t effective. So, the mission was on, to create an Intranet 2.0. The team worked for 2 1/2 years prior to my joining the organization, and had a lot of the theory worked out, had a lot of brainstormed featuresets, but hadn’t really figured out exactly what they were going to do.

I joined the organization in August and was hired specifically for this project, so I took a week and perused all the intelligence gathering that they had done until that point. There was a ton. It occurred to me that I wasn’t exactly sure what we were trying to do. I mean, I understood that we were trying to create an Intranet with a good few features, but what I didn’t have was the why. I didn’t have a sense of importance or urgency from the project, and it didn’t have a rallying cry. So we did a few brainstorming exercises and created a goal statement. This is one rule that projects, in my opinion, shouldn’t break. The second is communication. Everything else though, totally up for grabs.

Once we created a goal statement, I went about searching for resources. The team that did the original brainstorming etc. couldn’t be the actual executors, because they were more of a stakeholder team. I asked who we had, and was given 5% of one person, 10% of another. As I was compiling all of this I realized…there’s no way we can do it in a traditional project management methodology. Not unless we want it to take 2 more years. And then another wrench got thrown in the works. We wanted to launch *something* on Jan 29th (keep in mind this is the end of August now in the timeline), for the virtual Day of Connection. And we wanted to make it big.

Back to the drawing board, there had to be another way to make this work. After the list of requirements were drafted, I went about looking for a product to satisfy them. Could we have built it? Yes, but not in that timeframe (with so few people). We went through a narrowing down process and found ThoughtFarmer, who had the product that would satisfy most (if not all) of our requirements. But they satisfied some of our “softer” requirements more fully, and in this project, those were crucial. Because it wasn’t about the tools, it was about the connections and the communication that we were trying to affect. So, we started down the path of purchasing the software (a long process in the University). We wrote business cases, we filled out forms, we made negotiations and I presented the software to decision makers.

We went forward with the January 29th date for the launch, even though we hadn’t gotten final approval for the software yet. Now ordinarily I don’t like setting a hard and fast date without knowing how I’m going to get there (at least a little) but I was confident that we could do *something* for the 29th. I just didn’t know what. We got that date put on the Executive Team’s calendars…and then started thinking about how we were going to communicate this to everyone, and what we were going to do.

Prior to the software finally being purchased, we took a look at the resource situation again. Because even though we now had a technical plan in place (buy), we didn’t have a plan to handle the content. We, quite simply, needed more resources. I couldn’t do a pretty Gantt chart to help me communicate what was going to happen because quite frankly, we didn’t know. We couldn’t get a handle on how long things were going to take. So my colleague and I decided to go a different route.

We came up with a plan to solicit volunteers. We needed several different key roles, and so we decided that in the spirit of this very Enterprise 2.0 style project, we were going to see if there were people who were passionate about it, and to get *them* to help us. My dear colleague Christina McNeill (writer of The Communication Insider blog and my partner-in-crime for the project) drafted a fantastic email. We knew we couldn’t write the email to tell people exactly what they were signing up for, because we hadn’t communicated to the organization what we were doing yet – heck, we didn’t know what we were doing  yet. So we wrote the email vaguely, asking for people who wanted to sign up for something really cool – really unique. We wanted volunteers to be able to add content, create multimedia, train people in their areas, act as champions or evangelists through the transition, analyze our metrics, create policies and help us to edit the content.

Approximately twenty people replied to the initial email, and after verifying that all were able to work on this with their respective supervisors, we had a team of about 16. We gave presentations on the software, the philosophy, and the different roles. Most people elected to serve in multiple capacities. And they were seriously jazzed about it.

Now we had a workable plan, even if it was fuzzy and mostly drawn on whiteboards. It existed, and things started to take shape. I still couldn’t determine how much of those people we had, so we had to come up with a better way rather than meeting and sending people back to their respective units to work. We knew that things wouldn’t get done – everyone was just too busy.

So we decided to hold “barnraisings”. ThoughtFarmer was kind enough to provide us with a hosted demo version of the software, and we knew we could port the content when the purchase finally went through. There was a bit of faith required on this part, because we didn’t know if it would go through or not, but we had to persevere. Through these barnraisings and other efforts, we were able to put together a rather wildly successful launch.

Why was it successful? There are really too many elements to name, all were executed very well (if I do say so myself), but the one thing that sticks out to me is the fact that we didn’t let traditional methodologies, or really *any* one philosophy to pigeonhole us. We used all the methodologies when we could, and the project was driven by *spirit*. We were driven to make it a success because each and every person who was involved with it at that point believed in it. Believed in what we could do. Believed that what we were doing was the right thing.

This is not to say that the methodologies, Gantt charts, and rigid communication plans that my discipline promotes are not useful. It’s not that. It’s to say that *sometimes* you need to break the rules, and create new ones. Sometimes you have to forge pathways that you don’t know exist. Believe in your project and your project team, and things will very much get done.

I was doing some thinking today about the most successful projects that I’ve been involved with and led, and the least successful projects. It seems like it should be a simple thing – if you build it they will come…right? Well, no, that’s not the way it works. So, without further ado, I figured I’d give you a list of things that make a project guaranteed to fail.

1) It’s all about the technology

Negative! The technology part of a technology project is such a small piece of the pie. Remember, whether you’re buying or building something, the end result needs to be something that people will *use*. In order for people to *use* something they aren’t currently *using* they’ll have to change behaviors. And no one changes behaviors just because someone built something new. 

2) We don’t need a communication plan, it’s just a (insert whatever here)

If you intend to change people’s behaviors, you need to communicate with *everyone* and have a good communication plan for it. Don’t depend on your stakeholders communicating out to everyone else – they may not realize how crucial it is to give people accurate information in order to help them make the change. 

3) It’s no big deal, it’s just a little change

Oh, it *is* a big deal. No matter whether the change is positive, or large or small, it’s always a big deal for people to change behaviors, which is what they have to do to adopt a new technology, even if the technology change seems small to you. All people have different capacities for change, and those of us in the Project Management business are often endowed with plenty of capacity (which is why we’re able to manage the changes necessary to do projects), but that change capacity gets used up based on what else is going on in their personal and professional lives.

If you think of change capacity like a bunch of glasses full of milk – each person has a different size and fill level. As changes occur (positive or negative), you pour out some. Maybe from one glass you pour a quarter cup, maybe from another just a few tablespoons, but out it goes. Keep putting people under change loads and eventually *boom* an empty glass. A person (or people) with no more capacity for change. This is when people get *really really* negative about seemingly positive changes. Their capacity is empty, they can do no more.

A good technology project, no matter how big or small, takes a step back in the execution to consider what levels of change people are under (in general) and strategically thinks about when to ask them, and how to ask them, to make that change. There are documentable processes for this, which I’ll talk about in future blogs, but it’s important that you do it. Even just a few conversations about it is better than nothing. 

4) Meh, what could go wrong?

Risk events occur. They occur with different probabilities and different impacts, but they occur. And if you let them hit your project blindside it can put you on the failboat more quickly than anything I’ve ever seen. I know some people don’t like to talk about risks because it seems negative. It’s not. You’re talking about, documenting and planning for risk so that you know the warning signs and can prevent risk events from impacting your project. You can even capitalize on risks, but only if you know what the risks are. I’ll talk more about risk prevention and mitigation in a future blog post, but again, even a little bit of risk management goes a long way.

5) I must rigidly stick to my Gantt chart and schedule

I know, I know, we’re PMs, right? We love Gantt charts and Pert charts and network diagrams. I’ll admit, they can be handy on certain projects, but only when you build in a significant amount of flexibility and realize that a Gantt chart, while attempting to be predictive of future events, can only, at best, give you a guess as to what will occur unless the process is truly repeatable every time (which makes it no longer a project any more…unless some variables change). Rigidly fixing timelines and schedules can seriously hurt your ability to adapt to the peaks and valleys associated with a project. I’ll talk about some good ways to use Gantt charts, and some times when you want to *gasp* just throw the Gantt out the window and  think about managing projects in some other way.

6) Bob likes it, so we’re good

Is Bob truly the right sponsor? At the right level to help to make your project a success? I’ve seen lots of projects fail because the sponsor was lukewarm about it. Or didn’t know what his/her role was. As a PM it’s your job to help your sponsor understand his/her role and keep them helping you to make the project a success. There are lots of ways in which you can use your sponsor (communication is a biggie).

7) Once we flip the switch and do some training, we’re done!

This is one of the most common issues I see with IT projects. All goes well in communication etc, the flip is switched on the new technology, some users are trained and then *voila* it just happens, right? Not a chance. Going back to some of my previous points *behaviors are hard to change*. Think about any habit you have (as a person) it is HARD to change a habit or behavior. Even if you have incentive and you know what’s good for you! All IT Projects need GOOD transition plans after the fact, and those transition plans should include a detailed analysis of the care and feeding of your new application in the environment that it’s supposed to be in. Otherwise, it will look really good for a few days, weeks or months, and then people will go back to their old habits. Guaranteed.

So those are the top 7 that I see; there are so many more fail philosophies and pitfalls, but none as critical as these. Take a good hard look at your projects, and if you recognize one of these fail philosophies, don’t panic, you may be able to save it yet. More on that later…