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Tag: Project Management

9 Actions to Build Your Self-Confidence

Written by Neal Whitten,PMP on . Posted in Articles. 5 Comments on 9 Actions to Build Your Self-Confidence

Almost everyone suffers from low self-confidence at some time; while many people struggle with self-confidence issues regularly.

Low self-confidence will hold you back from achieving your potential. It can cause you to miss out on many opportunities and leave you with a less happy, satisfying and fulfilling life.

The good news? You can learn to become and remain self-confident. I will reveal 9 actions that can help build your self-confidence. The more you build your self-confidence, the more success you likely will achieve which, in turn, increases your self-confidence even more. Mastering self-confidence can change the rest of your life.

Let’s look at these 9 actions that can help you build your self-confidence.

1. Prepare and Practice

Do your homework. Your self-confidence will receive a huge boost when you have appropriately prepared yourself for some event. For example, if you have a presentation to make, thoughtfully developing the presentation and then sufficiently practicing your delivery and responses to imagined questions can make you both look and feel self-confident. Do not underestimate the power of preparation in giving you the self-confidence that you seek. Preparation and practice are one of the most important actions you can take to raise your level of self-confidence.

2. Express Yourself through Body Language

Your posture and the manner you engage with others can send a strong message that says you are engaged, ready for action and committed to this exchange or event. For example, sit upright with chin up. If standing, stand upright with shoulders back. With people from most cultures, give direct eye contact. Move your head, body, and arms when in discussion or listening one-on-one. Use open gestures and lean forward for emphasis. Don’t cower or withdraw into a fetal position. Shake hands firmly—avoid a limp handshake. Be generous with your smile.

3. Speak with a Deliberate Voice

Do not use a weak, unsure or timid voice. Don’t mumble. Speak with a strong, resolute and passionate voice. Speak slow enough to ensure you are not only heard but also understood. Engage others in conversation and participate in meetings and get-togethers.

4. Promote Positive Self-Talk; Eliminate Negative Self-Talk

You become what you think about all day long. You are listening to yourself; programming yourself. Give yourself respect and positive thoughts. Through your thoughts and actions, you create a self-fulfilling prophecy. The self-talk can come from your inner thoughts, your actual words, notes, and messages to yourself and any other form of self-communication. Don’t be so hard on yourself. Be honest and truthful, but also cut yourself some slack. We are all works in progress with plenty of room for improvement.

5. Do Not Be Controlled by What Others Think About You

It is far less important what others think about you than what you think about yourself. Listen to what people say. If there is a lesson to be learned, then do so and move on. If there is no lesson, then move on. If you give more weight to what others think about you than what you think about yourself, then you are giving control of yourself to others. Don’t give that power away. Interestingly, as an instructor who has a wealth of classroom and mentoring experience, occasionally—but only temporarily—even I slip and begin to focus more on the one negative class evaluation than the 29 positive evaluations. Never allow your source of self-confidence to come from someone else.

6. Listen to Your Own Advice

You have great self-confidence advice to give to a close friend or family member; how about applying that advice to yourself? For example, I expect that you have heard most, if not all, of the advice given in this article—although you may not have heard it packaged and presented in this way. However, it becomes more a matter of accepting and applying that advice and recognizing that it can apply as much to you as it does to others. So the next time you are experiencing low self-confidence, ask yourself what advice would you give a friend who is experiencing the same thing you are; then seriously consider following that advice.

7. Be a Good Actor

Once you know how you wish to be, then act on that image. The notion of acting may sound insincere, but it is not. This is how behavior is changed: through repetitive acting. In effect, you are faking self-confidence in the beginning, and eventually, you will feel more comfortable with your behaviors and become that person. As the saying goes: You fake it til’ you make it.

8. Avoid Being Around People Who Are Toxic to You

People who put you down, are constantly critical of you and overall behave destructively towards you can cause self-doubt and pull you down. This situation not only adds no value to your life, but it can also take away from you developing into the best version of you.

9. Do Something Risky

Step out of your comfort zone and take on something you typically would avoid. When you do, you will experience an inner excitement that has likely eluded you. Afterward, examine your actions and look for any lessons. You will be proud of yourself. Now do it again …and again.

I have listed these 9 actions and their brief descriptions in a 1-page takeaway that you are free to download and make copies.

Often I am asked if I believe that people are typically born with low self-confidence, therefore, must learn self-confidence. My experience is the opposite. I observe that people are typically born with high self-confidence. Notice how small children are curious, nonjudgmental and seem to be game for almost anything. As they grow from childhood into their teens, that self-confidence can be shaken based on the behaviors of the people around them. For example, as a teen, if you frequently experience put-downs, harsh criticism and outright nasty and rude behaviors then your self-confidence could easily come into doubt.

6 Tenets of Self-Confidence

I would like to conclude this article with six tenets to keep in mind on the important subject of building your self-confidence.

  1. Self-confidence can be learned, practiced and become a core part of whom you choose to be. This has to be encouraging to know if you harbor any doubts about your ability to be self-confident.
  2. Self-confidence is largely about what you think about yourself along with your knowledge, skills, and experiences that you have worked hard to acquire. As you achieve more—and recognize yourself for those achievements—the more your self-confidence will grow.
  3. Self-confident people tend to like themselves, believe in themselves, think positively about themselves, are optimists, seize upon the opportunity and live life to its fullest.
  4. The self-confidence you project is seen through your words, actions, and demeanor. The more self-confident you are, the more people see you and accept you this way which serves further to reinforce your self-confidence.
  5. Self-confident people are engaged in life and are always achieving things, big and small. These achievements build the foundation for their success. Low self-confident people avoid life’s opportunities, and therefore success becomes more elusive.
  6. Lastly, self-confidence is an important asset to a happy, satisfying and fulfilling life; it helps you to get more out of your life. Self-confidence will help you better appreciate and savor the good times and help you deal with the challenges that will continuously come your way.

Now, go become your imagined self!

The 10 Most Common Project Management Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Written by David Baker on . Posted in Articles. 71 Comments on The 10 Most Common Project Management Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

If you find yourself repeatedly failing to meet essential project deadlines or KPI’s, you might be making one, or more, of these very common project management mistakes.

Making an error in the workplace is inevitable. In fact, there’s a high probability many of us have made the same mistakes, and while at the time it can feel like an utter disaster it is the ability to recoup and learn from our failures that ultimately makes us better at our jobs.

Unfortunately, as project managers, even our smallest mistakes can have much larger implications further down the line, sending us over budget and past deadlines. Although each project will have its complex set of issues unique to it alone, across the industry there are some predictable and recurring factors we can address, that often doom a project to failure before it is gotten off the ground.

1. Assigning the Wrong Person to Lead the Project

Too often candidates are determined to lead projects due to factors other than their suitability or experience. Not that a lack of workplace experience cannot be made up of other factors, but taking charge of running a project is a difficult task, and often requires specific experiential skills or knowledge.

While it is true that skilled managers can lead across subject matters, for large scale projects with complex attributes, a greater number of team members, or a targeted technical knowledge requirement, it is much better to source the most experienced leader, rather than just the one who’s available.

Place as large a focus on assigning the correct manager for the job as you usually do to allocate resources, and place a higher priority on choosing a manager whose skill set more closely matches the project requirements.

2. Lack of Communication

Communication is essential in every relationship, but never more so than when between you and your project team. Not communicating properly, or at all, with your team and client, is one of the quickest ways to send your project to the grave.

By creating a culture of open communication, and setting out some simple communication strategies from the outset, such as regular check-ins and deliverable reviews, you and your team will have a clear view on your projects progression, and be able to proactively spot and resolve any issues coming up on the horizon.

Similarly, by engaging better with your team, you can keep your client in the loop with real-time project updates and avoid the awkward due date deliverable talk.

3. Mismanaging Team Members Skillsets

As important as it is to choose the right leader for the project, it is equally as important to choose the right team members and to take the time to understand exactly how their particular skillsets will fit into the larger scope of your project.

An excellent project manager analyses the project needs and utilizes his team in agreement with their strongest attributes.

If you do not have the luxury of handpicking a team to suit the project, then be sure to you sit down with your team before you begin and discuss their experience and competencies. Don’t be afraid to get specific. It is not enough to just know one of your team members has experience in web developing, filter out their specific disciplinary strengths and weaknesses and optimize their workload accordingly.

4. Too Broad a Scope

Anyone who’s been in the business long enough has experienced a project with a scope that appears to increase continually, while the price remains stagnant. Although this kind of scope creep where the project focus changes continuously over the length of the project should be in no way viewed as an inevitable part of the project process.

Scope creep often happens when the real outcome of the project is misunderstood by or is not consistent with the client, management, and the project team. This is why developing a clear scope statement at the outset of your project is so important.

A carefully thought out scope statement should include a clear and firm definition of the project goal, deliverables, what is both “in” and “out” of scope, and project constraints. Simultaneously, you must develop a system of strict, universal and well-documented approval processes so that any subsequent changes to scope, budget, schedule, resources, and risk are vetted and approved.

The scope statement should regularly be referred to for making future project decisions, and outlining a shared understanding of the project, and should never be created in isolation, but instead with the input of your entire team. Not only will they have knowledge, experience and valuable insights, but they will then be more aware of how and when to implement the process throughout the project

While it is true that project scope must have some degree of malleability placing checks and balances against changing any aspect of the scope allows you to make more considered decisions and control of rampant scope creep.

5. Over-Optimistic Scheduling

The importance of creating a realistic schedule for your team, and the project, cannot be understated.

It is too easy to create an over-optimistic schedule designed to impress the client but is completely infeasible. Not only is the probability of finishing the project with an acceptable, quality product very unlikely, but attempts to meet these dates will cause unnecessary stress for both you and your team, schedules to slip and throw your whole project out of whack.

The project schedule directs the project team on the what and when of their actions. For your client, it projects significant milestones and the due date of key deliverables, as such, it is important that you treat the creation of your schedule as a collaborative effort.

By checking in with your team on project effort and time estimates, and your clients own schedule, you can strike a compromise by which to meet your client’s expectations, and your team has the breathing room to finish the project to a high quality.

6. Lack of Detail in the Project Plan

A project plan is one of the essential elements of a successful project outcome, yet the most misunderstood when it comes to project management.

A project plan does not just mean ‘project timeline.’ While an expected chronology of your project is a major component of your plan, a project plan requires a much deeper level of information regarding all elements necessary to the planning process from the specification of the new project to the budget, schedule, and quality metrics.

When done correctly, a project plan acts your very own route planner. By providing insufficient detail in your project plan, you are not only opening your team for confusion about the full requirements of their time or tasks but leaving yourself without clearly defined metrics to measure the success of your project and management strategies.

Take the time before you start your project to identify all the activities and related tasks required to meet the project’s scope statement successfully and all your project deliverables including the estimated time duration and the assignment of a resource that will be held responsible for completing each task. Keep in mind, that the plan you make at the start may not be the one you finish with, but learning to create a clear project plan and knowing how to discuss its key components is crucial to your project’s success.

7. Not Recognizing Your Team’s Successes

Team morale and productivity go hand in hand, and refusing to recognize your team’s successes, often has a detrimental effect on both. Sometimes it is too easy to focus on the end game, metrics, and numbers, and forget the employee that pushed them to success.

The small successes, the short-term objectives, and daily goals, any extra effort to contribute to advancing the team’s mission is, where the individual shines, and should be celebrated.

Develop a performance review system as part of your project management plan, and ensure that performance on projects is measured, reviewed and recognized as equally as it is in their day to day responsibilities.

8. The Wrong Project Structure Used

Project management is not one size fits all, and while you may have had great success with a particular project structure before, it is dangerous to get too comfortable with one approach and ignore each project’s variables.

Let’s take size, project teams with a larger number of individuals, around 8 or above, will find it difficult to report to the same project manager. Just as, you, the project manager will find it overly challenging to maintain communication and follow ups with too many team members reporting directly to you. If parts of the project are undertaken in different regions of the country, communications may suffer from a lack of clarity and jar with the larger project structure.

It is key to assess each project individually and adapt communication strategies and reporting protocols to suit each new approach.

It may be useful to educate yourself and your team in umbrella project management methodologies that teach adaptable, industry standard project structures, so each project structure retains an efficient cohesiveness and familiarity.

9. Being Reactive Instead of Proactive

Your project is running correctly, aligning with your scope and project plan, but then something unexpected comes along and disaster hits. The project gets derailed. Even though you and your team mobilize quickly, identifying the best options and solutions based on experience, you have got no opportunity, nor time, to test these solutions viability. Acting reactively, management by crisis only leaves your project vulnerable to further failure.

Risk Management is the process of identifying, analyzing and responding to risk factors throughout the life of a project, and developing a stable basis for decision making in regards to those risks. A robust risk assessment provides controls for possible future events and is proactive rather than reactive.

While it is impossible to know every likelihood of every potential occurrence, by undertaking a thorough risk assessment before you execute your project plan, and continuously re-focusing that assessment throughout your project, you can reduce the likelihood of a disastrous event occurring, as well as its impact.

10. Being Resistant to Change

Although most this article has been spent pontificating about the importance of preparedness, clarity, and structure, the ability to be flexible and adaptive are qualities intrinsic to your project’s success.

Despite your extensive risk management and project planning, it’s likely the functionality of your project is going to change daily, whether it’s the small things such as missed meetings, employee absence, or a change in direction that requires you to develop a new approach or resource, and being rigid about your processes only ensures that your project is unlikely to see completion.

Being flexible isn’t something you can plan for. Remember that your project is an ongoing process, keep an open mind, and trust that you and your team will be competent enough to come up with a suitable solution.

10 DOs that we DON’T in Project Management

Written by Bola Adesope on . Posted in Articles. 2 Comments on 10 DOs that we DON’T in Project Management

I recently led a team on a four-week mini-project to conduct an independent research study on the art of project and program management across four sectors within the African market.

I must say that the result of the study is both interesting and surprising.

The study uncovered many actions by project managers that don’t align with the best practices project management. I have compiled the top ten “DOs that we DON’T.”

1. Project Charter

The Project Charter according to PMI is the document that among other things announces the existence of a new project or project phase. The project charter identifies the project manager and sponsor and authorizes the project manager to commit the resources of the organization to project activities. Best practices indicate that projects should not start or commence without a Project Charter approved and signed by the sponsor, but I found out that 98% of projects have no project charter. Lack of formal approval for the project is saddening and begs the question, “On whose authority are you running the project?”

The Sponsor might have the time and competence to write the project charter, but the responsibility is delegated to write the project charter to the Project Manager in some cases. Either approach achieves the best practice outcome of having a formally signed project charter.

2. Project Governance Structure

As a best practice, having a clear project governance structure identifies the responsibilities of decision-makers, escalation paths for critical issues and risks, and change control. You can understand how dumbfounded I was, after analyzing the result of our study to find that over 90% of projects do not have a Governance Structure. 

Most Projects had no Governance Structure, Change Control Board or Steering Committee. Who then provides direction for the project? It is hard enough to get people committed to a course. Not having a leadership and governance structure will only kill the project.

3. Physical Sign-offs

People often forget things. Desires and needs change for a project because of so many different things happening on inside or outside of the project. Best practice teaches us to always obtain physical sign-offs on deliverables such as Design Concept, Requirements Document, Project Plan, Change Request, and other critical project management documents. Surprisingly, many projects used verbal approval even though historically verbal approval has been shown to be less effective than a physical sign-offs.

4. Proper and Adequate Scope

Project scope is the foundation of project planning. It informs all sponsors and stakeholders of the boundaries for the project. It includes deliverables, features, and final products. Our study revealed that many projects do not have an adequate and proper scope document. Even in the Agile methodology, there are user stories which outline the scope of the sprint and combined with the Product and Sprint Backlogs that detail capabilities that remain to be delivered. The lack of a specific Project Scope Document often resulted in scope creep which at the end of the project led to budget overages, unapproved product/deliverables, and schedule delays. Allowing an incomplete or missing Project Scope document to exist without challenging it is setting up the project for failure and akin to digging the project’s grave.

5. Project Management Plan

A Project Management Plan is like a manual, blueprint, and compass for managing the project. When asked for the Project Management Plan, a high percentage of the PM practitioners responded with a project schedule developed using Microsoft Project, Primavera or Microsoft Excel. A project schedule only speaks to timelines, tasks and resource assignments. A project schedule does not include a communications plan, risk management plan or other critical planning documents the govern the project, and its processes. A project management plan does not have to be bulky, but it must capture the approach towards managing all the components (scope, cost, communication, risk and issues, quality, resources, stakeholders, change, and integration) on the project. Lots of practitioners did not create a project management plan for their projects.

6. Risk Register Update

A risk register or risk log is similar to the project management plan in that it is a living document that is continually updated. Although few practitioners managed to create a risk register or risk log, they did not update it regularly. Good practice is to have an agenda item at every project meeting to review the risk register. It baffles me how the risk register becomes a one-off document that is created once and abandoned considering the highly unstable project environments.

7. Verbal and Written Communication

Best practice Project Management recommends that we explore and plan for both verbal and written communication with a strong preference for written communications. Our research indicated lots of practitioners do either and not both. Of interest was a category of people that responded by saying they usually utilize verbal communication via telephone calls or hallway conversations but never followed up those discussions in writing with an email. If you have spoken to a stakeholder and a decision was on a project, it is best practice to send an email after the verbal conversation to recap the decision.

Most people send emails without asking for acknowledgment, or without sending an acknowledgment. Communication on projects and in life is a two-way process. When sending emails with some information, always ask for acknowledgment and feedback. When you receive an email, endeavor to send receipt acknowledgment.

8. Deliverable Review

The lack of Deliverable Reviews is particularly worrisome. I recently completed a strategic project where an outsourced tech-related component was sent to a vendor for the component construction. I lost count of the number of times the vendor indicated the component was completed only to find on review many errors and defects. Moreover, at those times I was thinking to myself like “Didn’t these guys review these features before sending out communication?” You can imagine how embarrassing it would be for your client to point out a seemingly obvious defect out to you on your project. Unfortunately, most practitioners do not conduct adequate reviews (or testing if you will) on accepting deliverables before communicating to clients. Keeping error away from customers is a good practice to increase the trust in the project’s ability to deliver with quality.

9. Lessons Learned

As a best practice, the Project Manager conducts a Lessons Learned session at the end of every project. Expectations are a Lesson Learned session will identify what went well, what did go so well, and identify recommendations for the next project team. In our research, over 95% of practitioners did not conduct Lessons Learned sessions talk less of developing lessons learned document. “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it” clearly defines the purpose of Lessons Learned.

10. Project Closure

There are three potential conditions for closing a project:

  1. The project objectives have been met.
  2. The project objectives cannot be met.
  3. The project is no longer needed.

The Project Manager has little or no control over the second and third instances. No matter the conditions for closure, the project must still go through the closure process even though many practitioners in our research did not properly close a prematurely terminated project as stated in conditions 2 and 3 above.

Bonus: Project Celebrations

Celebrating project milestones is an important team building activity. Do not skip the planning of a project celebration. Take the time to plan for project celebrations. In our research, most project teams did not celebrate after a successful project leaving the team feeling undervalued. Gather the team, have a drink, go to the club or have a party and celebrate!

In Conclusion

The objective of this write-up is not to expose bad practices but rather to awaken us and remind us of the best practices that we as Project Managers forget. Let me know your thoughts in the comments below. Are there best practices missing? What DOs and DON’Ts do you recommend?

Why Do You Need to Integrate Communication?

Written by Leonardo Chaves on . Posted in Articles. 2 Comments on Why Do You Need to Integrate Communication?

Several project management methodologies can follow models and best practices with greater or less adherence to guides.

The project manager can focus on developing a plan to control the changes as an agile leader deals with adaptations and the inevitable changes. Also, companies have their processes of your value chain. Traditional value chains focus on internal competencies, processes, and infrastructures, products and services, channels and customers. New value chains emphasize customer needs, integrated channels, products and services, processes and infrastructure that are flexible in internal competencies.

According to Kerzner, maturity projects means the adoption of a project management methodology and its utilization consistently. The implementation of a philosophy that directs the company toward a maturity in project management and communicates this to all employees. Management processes and organizational processes support the organization to achieve its results.

People work with knowledge of the processes in which their activities are embedded. What about the processes, employees often need to know why, for whom, impacts, standards and quality of the process. It would not be different to the necessity of information about the activities and the project.

The Project Manager could analyze communication and information requirements, dealing with the different needs, concerns and expectations of stakeholders and especially the team as the project is planned and carried out. Also, the project manager should worry about the conflicting constraints of the project which includes but are not limited to scope, quality, schedule, budget, resources and risk.

Communication is critical for the project manager to be able to integrate the management processes. It also refers to the exchange of information. So communication can be thought of as a plan or organized under agile or hybrid models. Communication thought of as a project of the information exchange plan there is greater control and formality. It is to specify methods to transmit information without noise, clearly, always taking feedback from the receiver.

In an agile communication often occurs face to face between the team members, with a client, managers, business analysts, etc. which can be gathered in a single room. Real – time communications is emphasized with constant feedback and transparency. There is also the need for maturity among team members.

It is important to distinguish the integration of project management processes in an approach as guided by the PMI and the integration of other agile methodologies, for example. While agile integration is related to the leadership role within the team, process-oriented integration has the definition of process inputs and outputs within the project life cycle. This consolidates all phases of the project (initiation, planning, execution, monitoring and control and closure).

Integration also involves getting all the parts of a project into a cohesive unit. Moreover, active management is the primary role of the project manager. It supports the iteration in the project and consists of making choices about where to focus resources and efforts, anticipating potential problems, treating them before they become critical and coordinating the work. The need for integration in project management is evident in situations in which individual processes interact: Cost, Time, Risks, etc.

Communication in all the methodologies upgrades the level of knowledge of all about the project. The management integration in the project also represents the balance between all areas of knowledge, according to the PMI. In high-performance teams, “leaders manage principles, and principles manage a team.” Carl Larson and Frank LaFasto (1989).

Leadership is the attribute of people, distinct from formal authority. The motivations of the project team, the project mission, the leadership skills and the context within which the leadership process is exercised are highlighted. Additionally, motivation (high or low) and competence (high or low) should be analyzed. Leadership also relates to the Development Team, Motivation, Communication, Influence, Decision Making, Knowledge and Cultural and Trading. It is a broad subject and involves a substantial body of knowledge that is not limited to the context of projects that have been investigated as a skill to develop.

It is up to the project manager to make an analysis of the project stakeholders and communication requirements. These requirements result in the information needs of stakeholders and are defined by combining the type and format of information required with an analysis of the value of such information.

The necessary information may include organizational charts, project organization, responsibilities among stakeholders, internal and external information needs, departments involved, etc. Additionally, it is recommended that the “bad news” should be shared and the number of participants in a project that determines the number of communication channels. It is natural to have a larger number of participants in a project greater scope.

A critical component of project communications planning is determining and limiting who will communicate with whom and who will receive what information as the project manager integrates the processes and the project takes place.

References
[BURB07] Burbridge, R. Marc; Costa, Sérgio de Freitas e outros. Gestão de Negociação. Editora Saraiva, 2ª. Edição, 2007.
[CLE06] Cleland, David I.; Gareis, Roland. Global Project Management Handbook. Second Edition, McGraw-Hill, 2006.
[KERZNER06] Kerzner, Harold. Gestão de Projetos – As Melhores Práticas, 2ª. Edição, Bookman, 2006.
[LAR89] Larson , Carl E.; LaFasto, F. M. J. Teamwork: What Must Go Right/What Can Go Wrong, SAGE, ISBN 0803932901, 1989.
[PMBOK09] Project Management Institute. “Um Guia Do Conjunto De Conhecimentos em Gerenciamento De Projetos (Guia PMBOK): A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge – Official Portuguese Translation”, 4th Edition, PMI, 2009.
[SUT14] SUTHERLAND, JEFF. Scrum – A Arte de Faze o Dobro de Trabalho na Metade do Tempo. LEYA CASA DA PALAVRA, 2014.

Slay the Dragon of Risky Innovation

Written by Alexis Devenin on . Posted in Articles. 4 Comments on Slay the Dragon of Risky Innovation

It is well accepted that companies who embrace innovation achieve competitive advantage and prevail in difficult times…

while companies that do not innovate become less competitive and can’t survive due to their lower performance.

Even though most companies write in their vision statement something like “leading by innovation” in most cases that declaration is not much more than beautiful words. Few of them have a strategy based on innovation. Several companies are not continuously innovating, rather innovating casually and haphazardly. When they implement innovation projects, usually they suffer high stress, because their mindset is the mindset of efficiency and optimization, while innovation deals a lot with experimentation and uncertainty.

Sponsors of innovation projects are intrapreneurs; therefore they are optimistic and perseverant by nature. As a project manager, your mission is not to be optimistic nor pessimistic, but realistic. You should have the ability to identify risks and to project scenarios, and to prepare risk responses and to have contingency plans to minimize economic and productive losses in case of failure.

The change of a piece of equipment in the production line by a prototype that can produce new products or achieve superior levels of quality and productivity correspond to a typical innovation project in production lines. The sponsors of the project usually have high expectations. Vendors and manufacturers of the equipment are very optimistic too (it cannot be another way because they must sell you the equipment). In general, manufacturers have tested the equipment in their factories, but factories conditions differ in much aspects to the environment in which the equipment should work.

Innovation, by nature, implies risk. You should realize that success is just a possibility, not a particular result. Other possibilities are a partial success (or partial failure) and total failure. Eventually, goals will be achieved, but rarely on the first try. Innovation implies iteration.
Some problems that can be present during commissioning of a prototype productive machine are:

  1. Product specifications not achieved.
  2. Specified productivity or quality rates not achieved.
  3. Excessive time in the adjustment or calibration process.
  4. Erratic or unstable performance.

The impossibility to achieve product specifications and productivity or quality rates could be related to poor product specification during the design phase (possibly the equipment was designed to process a limited number of products, not the entire set produced in plant), poor raw material specification, incorrect design or lack of quality in the components or in the construction of the equipment.

Excessive time in the adjustment process and unstable performance could be related to poor design, insufficient testing of the prototype in the factory and uncontrolled variables like work environmental factors, variability in raw materials, etc.

If the calibration of the equipment takes several times the scheduled time with no significant improvements, it is time to realize that the problem is not adjustment but the design and go back to the engineering office to improve the design. Ideally, define with anticipation how much time will be available for changes, avoiding unsuccessful work and time.

While various of these causes could be prevented during the design or engineering phase, as a project manager, you must be prepared to confront these issues during the commissioning phase.

Some important questions to consider during planning risk responses are:

  • Is the modification reversible?
  • Can we produce and stock a considerable amount of product before that the replacement of the existing equipment is done, to replace the lack of production during the commissioning phase of the new equipment?
  • In this case, what volume or quantity of production is necessary?
  • There are other equipment or lines in the plant that, working at high production rates or in additional shifts, can compensate the production of the replaced equipment during the commissioning process?
  • If we are not able to achieve to produce an individual product, what percentage of the production volume it represents?

The answer to these questions involves the engagement of several areas, like production planning, operations management, logistics, sales, etc. In some cases, it could be convenient to communicate the project goals to the clients, and by that way, get some flexibility from them, in view that the project will result in a better quality of the product or in better order completion time.

Finally, during the commissioning process, you must manage stakeholder’s expectations and moods. When things do not work as expected, frustration, rage, and discouragement appear. If you have developed scenario analysis and alternative plans, and you have communicated risks before the execution phase, you are in good standing.