Project Management - You Give Me The Feature Creeps
The caliber of the project management you have merged into your job or department can mean the difference between holding out and flighing high in a very no holds barred industry that you serve. It's very crucial to understand the evolution of a project management lifecycle and avoid skirting or skipping important upfront issues from the outset. It's also very important to understand the concept of not over analyzing a problem or being paralyzed to a point where further action is not being carried out. A dreadful opponent to you in this case would be "Feature Creep" where individuals from the department keep changing their minds on requirements or have new ideas on better ones. Beware of feature creep as it will rear it's ugly head at every step of every stage you encounter of your project. Things such as that, as well as losing focus on the core objectives will typically result in project failure because a core component or stage of the project is not able to move forward. Leadership in this examples is utterly critical in order to prevent mishaps, and total project disasters from happening. These usually are not only a waste of time, resources, but a major drain on employee morale and faith in the leadership of the entire organization. It's critcally important to phrase a communication strategy before the project begins. Make sure to sit down with the clients and constituencies during a set agenda and with set goals as well as a decided upon methodology to capture and organize requirements from everyone who has a stake in the project you are working on. Otherwise they will call you up every five minutes and give you new requirements or ask you to alter existing ones. Needless to say, this is not a very productive use of your time nor is it of theirs. A solid big picture view of all the project needs has to be looked at before moving forward with the actual implementation. This due diligence will take up a bit more time in the beginning but will save lots of time, money, headaches, and potentially broken relationships down the line.
