Insurance Projects Failure – Our Nine Top Lessons
In our first post on project management failure we discussed the topic of inaccurate project sheduling. We will continue with this series of posts and discuss the major project failure points that cause so many projects to fail to deliver the business and technology change that is envisaged at the outset of the project. These project failure points are not in any particular order of importance but the occurrence of any of these risks to your project can have a very detrimental impact on your project objectives. To a Project Manager, using the right tools is critical to the success of any project so we will now discuss another important risk to an IT project – Project Management Software and Tools.
Project Management Pitfall #2 – Lacking Project Management Tools
Because this particular post is a discussion of potential project management failure points, I’m not going to list product names. The type of project managment toolset that you need will depend on many factors that are specific to your organisation and project. So, instead, let’s just say for certain that most of your large projects or enterprise businesses will benefit greatly by standardising on a project management software toolset that best suits your needs. Not having one will more than likely cause your project to fail, or at the very least fall short of expectations. So, get a project management software tool. You can start by using Mr Google to search for project management tools and there are lots, so pick one that is suited to your organisation and project or here at JMR Consulting UK Ltd we can help.
For example, suppose you have a large project team of 20+ members. You handle projects that span multiple cost centres or some other outsourced vendors and outside suppliers or freelancers. In that case, your business would want to consider choosing a project management tool that provides the ability to function over multiple, non-standard platforms and has a Web-based interface or access via an online portal. As a minimum you will want to look to make sure that your project management software includes features for estimation and planning, scheduling, cost control and budget management, resource allocation, collaboration software, communication, quality management and which can be used to deal with the complexity of large projects.
So Project Management Lesson Number Two is to make sure that you have a selected and are using an appropiate project management toolset for your project. Ask yourself how important software is for managing projects? How much time will it save? How much it can help you in delivering a successful project? What parts of it are lifesavers and what parts can you live without?
JMR Consulting UK Ltd can help you with your answers to these questions
We have worked very successfully with some of our major clients to deliver fairly complex business projects. Here at JMR Consulting UK Ltd we promote the use of project management best practices on all our projects. If you want advice or help with your projects or project tools and software, please contact us.
To find out more about how we can help you with project management, please get in touch by using the contact form, sending an email to info@jmruk.com or calling us on 0845 052 0900.