Without the Right Project Management Courses You Will Fail!

It’s the sad truth but many projects being started right now will fail.  The failure rates of projects in all industries are still, unfortunately at levels that are too high.  As someone that has been involved with the project management field for over 10 years I can assure you that it’s not the project manager’s fault. 

So why is there such a high failure rate?  I blame some of it on the expectations of clients and stakeholders but those expectations can be managed by a professional project manager with the right training and skills sucg as those advoacted by the Association for Project Management (APM).  For some reason many people still expect to start a project with little planning or controls in place and then expect it to be successfully delivered.

Early Training is Critical

I think one of the biggest mistakes that people make is appoint a project manager and then completely forget about them and expect the project to be delivered on-time and on-budget.  They don’t offer any support or training and the new project manager feels completely lost.  First and foremost, you need to teach project managers about the recognised methodologies and how to best implement them by following best practise from the Bodies of Knowledge available from the Association for Project Management (APM) or the Project Management Institute (PMI).  As a senior executive, you should not expect them to figure everything out on their own.

After they have a good understanding on how projects operate, you should begin to share with them lessons learned from other projects completed in your business.  Why?  Do you want your PMs to duplicate effort or, worse, mistakes?  Share everything you know with your new project managers and help them to get out of the gate as fast as possible.  I believe that another reason why projects fail is because stakeholders don’t see results quickly enough and they lose interest. This is where an agile approach to managing projects can help – by delivering frequent updates and tangible interim deliverables will keep everyone on the project enthused by progress.

Set goals for each of the team members.  Have them right down their goals and follow up with them on a weekly basis to see where they are at.  Provide training and mentoring where needed and help them contribute as much as they can to the project.