7 Deadly Sins of Project Managers

7 Deadly Sins of Project Managers

People all make mistakes. People can improve. People need to be told of their mistakes. Project managers are people too…

Project managers are sometimes no exception. Therefore those mistakes may become big news and can be – depending on the mistake – quite damaging and costly to the projects we are running.

That’s the reason of this post, to present to everybody the Seven Deadly Sins of Project Managers. In this blog post I will describe the typical sins I have seen Project Managers fall into.

1. Wrong Project Methodology

  • Predictive (Traditional)

  • Iterative

  • Incremental

  • Adaptive (Agile)

  • Decide with customer and Project Management Team

  • Size of project, stakeholder decision and amount of risks can override your decision.

2. Lack of Project Governance

  • Decision Making Workflow)

  • Decision tolerances per decision maker

  • Define PM. Sponsor, Senior Management and 1 executive

3. Communications Plan not defined

  • What Reports, who and when?

  • What Artifacts, who and when?

  • What Meetings, who and when?

  • Virtual team Communications?

4. Team Training Plan Missing

  • How to analyze current skills level of team?

  • What training needed for team to close skill gap?

  • Do we have training plan and schedule?

  • How to Measure training effectiveness?

5. No Project Management Plan on board

  • How to analyze risks?

  • How to determine tasks and responsibilities?

  • How to define, manage costs and schedule?

  • How to define, plan scope and changes? If we are using agile methodologies, our plan will be Product Backlog and Sprint Backlog.

  • How to follow up project benefits?

  • How to apply quality standards in to our project?

6. Team Grounding rules & values

  • Set team expected behaviors

  • Sharing and making knowledge visible

  • Helping each other is mandatory

  • Competition not allowed

  • Collaboration only technique used in conflict resolution

7. Project Vision and metrics not well-defined

  • Purpose of project

  • Project Business Values

  • Key measurements for realizing those benefits

Mr. Serkan Kaya

Authorized PMI Coach