- Prevent costs escalations and budget overruns as they can outweigh the project benefits.
Have a robust vision of budget performance tolerance, but never go beyond the reasonable limits.
- Don’t miss the right time for delivering the project benefits.
As a delayed project finish may lead to reducing or missing the value of expected project’s benefits.
- Avoid any uncontrolled changes to specifications and scope.
As this leads to project scope creep that can just collapse all previous calculations and estimates, hence kill the project;
- Stay attentive to quality requirements and monitor any changes in quality against the benefits;
Focusing on costs, time and deliverables usually leads to neglecting some quality features. Compromise on quality can appear a fatal mismanagement;
- If possible, keep the business strategy cardinally unchanged.
As its redirection may deprive your projects of their strategic meaning (when strategic goals that the projects contribute towards are changed) and hence make them less relevant;
- Monitor the market and anticipate all trends, as some changes can make the project obsolete.
- Complete project triage to withdraw any inefficient projects from your organization’s portfolio.
Manage business resources accurately and reasonably to secure your organization’s capability to resource its projects adequately, because the internal competition for limited business resources may steal important resources from more viable projects, hampering them;
- Examine the project’s risk/return ratio continuously, along with the project’s progression.
It may begin to look less attractive as the project is unfolding. The worse a situation with risks, as well as the more illusory the planned project returns look, the less viable the project is;
- Control relevance of project assumptions and requirements.
If a project is based upon outdated facts, then it risks to appear disconnected from reality, hence it begins to lose its benefits;
- Provide wise staff management policy.
Control availability of competencies that you need to end the project successfully. A poor or short-sighted staff management can permanently cut off the project from necessary workforce, so its performance will be retarded;
- Make sure that the contractors involved into the project (if any) are capable of delivering their services.
Anticipate their inability early (have back-up plans for each one), because if some technology or service is not delivered on-time the project can cease and fail;
- Clarify all progress measures, specifications, and consider all competent opinions beforehand.
To prevent any...