When a project is going well the small wins and successes can generate huge amounts of momentum which propels the team and project forward at pace.
When things aren’t going well it’s a completely different story. Small issues can pile up into big problems. Unforeseen setbacks create delays, a day here, a few days there. Before you know it the project has slipped a few weeks and is suddenly in jeopardy.
Managing a complex project is tough because there are dozens, if not hundreds, of critical decisions that need to be made in real-time. It is impossible to get all these decisions right and invariably somethings will go wrong.
When projects are going well, we seldom stop to ask why. Momentum generated by success pushes us straight onto the next job. When things go wrong, we can suddenly find ourselves at a dead stop. We are then scrambling to make things right again.
It doesn’t take much to knock a technical project off course:
- A piece of hardware with thousands of parts might not work because of just one missing component.
- A software program might not run properly because of one bad syntax or incorrect line of code.
- A complex product system test may ‘fail’ because of one faulty or incorrectly setup piece of test equipment.
If things are going well it’s a sign that the fundamentals of the project are being managed well and the team are doing the right things at the right time. The devil is always in the detail.
If things start going wrong the project may only need a minor correction to get it back on track. What details did we miss? Where did we deviate from the plan? What did we forget to do?
In any complex project there is a fine line between success and failure. Finding that line can quickly help you get the project back on track and avoid making a bad situation worse!
