Stop Missing Deadlines: Effective Strategies for On-Time Project Completion
Strategy #1
Inclusivity in Planning: Including a diverse group of stakeholders (“unusual suspects”) in the timeline creation can lead to a more comprehensive understanding of the project’s scope and potential challenges.
Who are these unusual suspects? They are the stakeholders who are typically overlooked when planning a project. They represent those roles and responsibilities that are sometimes taken for granted or not seen as part of the group experiencing the primary impact of the new process or technology. Changing from an internal payroll process to an outsourced payroll service? Don’t forget that the administrative assistants who work for the front line managers are an unsung group of stakeholders. They represent the first line of defense for payroll issues when things go awry.
Other delays can occur when there’s a late breaking change due to integration issues - what you thought would be possible in the requirements stage is found to be more difficult than understood. That creates the need to take a step back and rethink how the new process will be developed with this change. This might mean redirecting work to a support team that was not originally thought to be impacted by the new process; they were not seen as stakeholders if all the integration had worked as planned on paper.
Who are the typical voices and players included in planning a project? The sponsors, vendors, key team leaders come to mind. Learning from each of these constituencies what they know about the kind of impact the new process or technology represents for user testing and the need to keep in mind their other work, as well as the budgeting and approval cycles to be considered are all a great starting point. However, there are unusual suspects in this process. Failure to take them into account at the beginning can create project delays.
For example, when you make changes in core aspects of the work within your teams, does this require a new set of training on the learning management system? How about new job aides and user guides? When do you hire for this team? Continuously? How will these changes be accommodated in your recruitment and onboarding timelines? If you have to put a hold on recruitment to ensure that you implement the new training and onboarding requirements successfully, this needs to be added to your project plan.
How to avoid these types of impacts on the project schedule?
Use a front end process of identifying all the stakeholders and all the impacts on their work - including dependencies that exist now and will be created in the future state. With all potential impacts identified, including the entirety of the stakeholders in a series of timeline reviews will highlight risks and issues early.
Map a thorough present state and future state with all assumptions clearly outlined - this will highlight where there may be a risk of failure if the assumptions do not hold up.
Take note of the people who support the people involved in the project - there are service departments all over the company who have no insight into the change if you don’t include them.
In the next few editions of our newsletter, we'll continue to dive into each of these strategies with a practical set of actions to take to ensure that your project launches on time.
In the meantime, be sure to check out the "Week to Change" for a bite size daily lesson in how to create a great change strategy for your project.
