One key to success is making sure everyone understands what your project is supposed to accomplish. Here are tips for putting together a project goal that keeps your project on track to success.

Identify a specific business objective or issue to resolve. Successful projects solve a significant ongoing issue or produce new capabilities for the business and/or its customers. The project goal should succinctly describe the capability or issue, and the outcomes the project will deliver. For example: “The project will address gaps in tracking shipments to our remote locations by creating an extension to our existing logistics application.”

Verify the goal beyond your sponsor and primary customer. As key stakeholders, the project sponsor and primary customer must support the project goal statement. To ensure an accurate and meaningful project goal, conduct a stakeholder inventory and verify the project goal with other influential leaders. That way, you avoid questions about the project intent or scope that could delay project launch. 

Smaller goals work best. Project goals can be quite extensive, which is not only fine, but also often necessary. However, smaller goals achieved through a series of targeted projects are less risky than trying to run one large project. Agile project methods embrace this concept. Breaking your goal into smaller pieces means achieving outcomes earlier. Also, smaller goals might reduce the need for organizational change management activities. You can still achieve significant objectives by delivering in progressive steps. 

Don’t dilute the goal. Ensure every project task helps you achieve your goal. Especially on longer projects, other goals have a way of sneaking into your project. Ensure that you and your team members focus on only the work needed to complete your project as defined. Enforce a stringent change management process to avoid scope creep, and you’ll be on your way to delivering successful outcomes!

For more about project management, check out my Project Management Foundations course.

A productive cultural environment is critical to delivering successful project outcomes. Here are tips for managing a productive project culture whether your project has a unique culture or is an extension of your organization’s culture.

Plan cultural development tasks. Effective project culture doesn’t happen by accident. The best project managers are purposeful about developing a positive culture: constructive ways to make decisions, defining your authority, and defining your technical team leaders’ responsibilities. Building a common understanding of how you will communicate with each other is a fundamental cultural requirement. This takes more effort than most people realize. Vendor personnel might need to adjust their habits and expectations for your project. Employees from different offices or countries might need to adjust.

Plan for tasks to bring your team together and ensure cultural expectations are aligned. While people are adjusting their cultural expectations, spend time to help them smoothly integrate with your project.

Get feedback. Cultural transitions might be difficult for team members. Even when they may appear to be working well, they may struggle working within your team’s expectations. Ask for and carefully review feedback regarding your project culture. Listen carefully and offer help if you have any doubts about their comfort level.

Focus on positive intent. You may find team members’ cultural expectations differ from your own. Don’t dismiss their expectations as wrong or incongruent. Instead, focus on the positive intent of their cultural norms. Learn what they hope to achieve through their cultural habits. Ask team members whether they see difficulties or risks in the cultural elements you put in place. This helps build deeper understanding and make team harmony easier to achieve.

Be flexible and consistent. Team members work best when they feel understood and appreciated. The best results come from being flexible to accommodate individual needs, while being consistent working with your full team. Say a team member has different expectations about their involvement in decision making. You can speak with them ahead of time one-on-one, while involving the entire team in the decision after that conversation. The individual’s expectations are met, while the team sees a consistent approach to making decisions.

Review your results. Once you bring together your project culture, don’t lose focus on it. Your culture will be challenged by the stresses of project highs and lows. Work with your team and adjust to meet the perceived needs of your team members. Spend extra time collecting opinions or provide more assurance to hard working team members – it can help you maintain your team’s effectiveness.

For more about corporate culture, check out Sara Canaday’s Organizational Culture course.

I manage my life like one long project. Quick review: It’s a project because my life is a temporary endeavour (I don’t want to live forever) that is unique and comes with a budget. Life is messy so it really needs managing! Here’s why I project-manage my life and you should manage yours, too.

Priorities are important – and the primary stakeholder is demanding. Like any project, there are many possible outcomes and multiple ways to reach each outcome. Prioritizing outcomes and deciding how to achieve them is my approach to projects: Understand the possibilities, look at the alternative strategies and choose the best one. For my life project, I decide what I want, how I can achieve those things, and pick my path. The big difference between my life and a project is the primary stakeholder…I’m more demanding and second-guess myself more than any of my other project stakeholders have ever done!

You never get time back. The first question about a project is usually “what’s the schedule?” My first task every morning is to check my schedule. Whether for personal time or a project, every minute is something you can’t redo. Getting the most out of time is important, whether I’m managing deliverables or delivering dinner to friends.

Money creates balance and safety. A budget helps balance income and expenses in projects and in life. Effectively managing finances helps support my lifestyle — my home, car, hobbies travels, and philanthropy. Think cost-benefits. Finances support the tools and people who deliver my “lifestyle” and minimize the risk of my life project being cancelled!

Regular health checks are vital. Exercising, keeping fit, eating properly and regular medical check-ups maintain my vitality. Besides hiring the right people, deploying the right tools, and managing diligently, regularly scheduled life status meetings are important. Not just medical check-ups. It’s important to take the time to evaluate my life and decide whether my goals have changed. Life status meetings are also a good time to identify what’s working, not working, and what I could be doing better. (If you don’t like meeting with yourself, consider creating a board of directors for your life – which is a topic for another article.)

To check out my courses, jump to http://linkedin-learning.pxf.io/bonnie-blog

You don’t have to look far to find project failures. While many circumstances contribute to project failure, a few common circumstances often are the culprits that make good projects go bad. Here are the most prevalent management failures that lead to failed projects:

A lack of proper management. Projects without professionally trained —and supported— project managers are like sailboats without a rudder. Eventually they will crash. The only question is what they will hit before sinking. Proper project management is mandatory.

Poor stakeholder management. Generating deliverables that don’t meet the expectations of stakeholders usually results in project failure. Disenchanted stakeholders rarely use deliverables they didn’t want or expect, no matter how good they may be. Making sure stakeholders buy into the products you’re producing is vital to delivering successful projects.

Throwing good money after bad. One of my favorite phrases is, “Fail early, it’s cheaper.” Nowhere is this more accurate than with projects. Once a project becomes troubled, cancellation may be the best outcome, because it saves money, time and, in the long run, can enhance your reputation. Justifying spending more money to validate the money you have spent so far is foolish. Look at where the project is today, and the time and money it will take to generate business value. If the money it takes to recover the project stands up to the scrutiny of a business case, then continue. If not, cancellation is the best alternative.

Avoiding the perception of failure while you are already seen as failing. Managers rarely understand that failed projects that take forever to “go away” do more reputational damage than one cancelled to minimize corporate impacts. Project cancellation is a proactive alternative to failure. When things go bad, understand the root cause and stop the project. Then, perform better project definition, risk management or other alternatives to start a new project with an increased chance for success.

For more about project management, check out my Project Management Foundations course.

Senior level project management is more than competence. The myriad responsibilities that come with this role require broader skills.

Razor-sharp business focus. Senior PMs understand and manage their project priority against other active initiatives in the portfolio. Senior PMs clearly articulate this information to negotiate with stakeholders. They also keenly leverage their sponsor’s strengths to successfully launch and guide their projects.  Senior project managers also deeply understand their project’s products and how they’ll impact their stakeholders.

An easy manner with all stakeholder types. Senior project managers readily deal with all kinds and levels of stakeholders, even the ones who don’t share the same agenda.  They advise senior leaders to influence their decision making.  They also work well with entry level team members because they generate trust through straightforward communications. Senior PMs can manage stakeholders because they fully understand the status and role each stakeholder plays in their projects.

Delegation and coaching to support their projects and team members. As larger, more complex projects require more management, the Senior PM delegates – especially technical items – to team members with specialized skills. They also rely on others to directly manage the project, including the coordination of status reporting, detection and resolution of project issues, and handling some customer interactions. The Senior PM takes time to understand other’s capabilities, so they know when to intervene to get tasks accomplished. The best senior PMs use coaching to develop team members. Skillful coaching allows the Senior PM to support and enhance the skills of others and get the best out of their teams.

Change Perspective.  Senior project managers determine the degree of organizational change their stakeholders can handle. This involves both the short-term impacts and how the project’s deliverables fit into the business’s strategic direction. Senior PMs design their projects to successfully deliver change with both sound business processes and technical deliverables. 

Change from a business perspective requires the Senior PM to understand the actions of competitors, new demands from customers, and other changes in the marketplace that require the business to respond. They also understand the capabilities of their business team members, so the project’s new tools and processes are understandable to business stakeholders and can be readily deployed. 

Mastery of risk management. Senior project managers cope with risks that aren’t in their direct sphere of influence. They utilize risk response plans that are tailored not just to the outcome of a risk event, but also the multiple causes that can trigger it. For example, purchased components may not show up in time. The lesser experienced project manager will order extra product from another vendor to mitigate the risk. That’s a good response strategy…unless delivery drivers are on strike. Senior PMs anticipate and accommodate the different events that can turn risks into issues.

For more about being a project manager, check out the courses in the Become a Project Manager learning path.