In my last post about the “school solution,” I noted that there’s something unnerving about project and program managers who skip over the basics. As Glen Alleman noted in his comment, the PM school solution or black letter law almost always has some merit as a start.
Thinking about this post brought to mind the various project management myths, missteps, and mistakes that put me on edge. These three always make me wonder about the person who says them:
- Calling a project schedule a project plan.
- Not knowing the difference between an issue and a risk.
- Suggesting that planning is useless if we don’t know all of the activities.
What are your pet peeves? Which PM faux pas makes you nervous, irritable, and discontented with those who make them?
I smell a poll here!
Filed under: PMO | Tagged: Black Letter Law, pet peeves, Project Management, School Solution
- Answering yes to everything
- Answering no to everything
The above 2 can be disastrous.
Calling people “resources” when it’s clear the PM means people, as in “Our DBA resource is out ill.”
1) Not listening to the project team when communicating.
2) Not aggressively milking every significantly mistake for a learning lesson.
3) Claiming to be managing scope when requirements have not been linked to cost.
Most methodologies (e.g. PMI, Prince2) do not make very clear distiction between risks and issues.
Therefore Black Letter Law requires a common glossary for being effective.
Setting a working procedure for collecting “issues” for making possibile to sift the risks among them needs to be tailored on company’s culture.
double negatives in a sentance!