Jennifer Greene: Buckets of Problems

By Caitrin McCullough

Here's the latest from Jennifer Greene, coauthor of Head First PMP and Head First C#.

Andrew mentioned the Why Projects Fail talk that we've been giving around at various meetings and conferences over the past few months. Pretty much everybody has a war story or two from a project they were on that was fraught with problems. We came up with some categories for the kinds of problems that teams face:

• Feature problems—Things the software does or doesn't do.
• This category would include software projects that ended up missing major requirements. When you build software that's supposed to do something more than you built it to do.
• Planning problems—Things the team does or doesn't do.
• This one would account for times when you just rushed headlong into coding without thinking enough about the approach and you ended up with a product that wasn't scalable or was super hard to maintain.
• Quality problems—Problems that should've been caught earlier that end up causing major problems
• This category would account for those times when software projects get all the way to testing before anybody realizes that they're full of really big, really scary bugs that will take a long time to correct.
• Management problems—Things the boss does to screw things up
• Ever had your boss come in and let you know that he just committed your team to deliver a brand new feature in a product that was almost done - and he's not going to give you any extra time to do it?

Think about the projects you've been on that took a ton of extra effort to get out the door. Or the ones that didn't actually produce what they should've—could you have diagnosed the problems a little earlier if you'd known the warning signs to look for? Would you categorize the problems on your most challenged projects as falling into one of these categories? Which one causes the most trouble for you?

We think that understanding those problems are the real motivator for learning the tools and techniques that will help your projects succeed. It's being open and honest about the times when things haven't worked out as planned that will help you get better at planning in the future. The PMBOK(r) is full of a lot of really great tools and techniques that can help you avoid project failure, but only if you really think about how to apply all of those tools in the toolbox. Thinking about what's gone wrong before is a good way to figure out where to focus your efforts.

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