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Is each risk prioritized correctly?
Has the impact of each risk been estimated correctly?
Have the risks been sufficiently mitigated?

Diagnosing Project Planning Problems

If a project is not planned well, it will veer off course fairly quickly. If the project manager
does not take the lead in defining the scope immediately, the project will quickly become
chaotic. Even if the scope seems to be defined well, the project manager must make sure
that all stakeholders really understand and agree to it in order to avoid problems later on
in the project. The team must buy into the scope as well, or else they will make decisions
that are not in line with the project goals.

Lack of Leadership
It’s not uncommon for people to intuitively feel that all they need for a project to be suc-
cessful is a group of highly talented and motivated people. But even the best people will
have trouble starting a project if nobody takes the lead.

One common problem that comes from a lack of leadership is tunnel vision. Each team
member knows how to do her specific tasks; however, there’s no way to plan for every
detail of that task. She will almost certainly encounter decision points. For example, she
may see a better way to solve a particular problem that will cost time but lead to a better
solution. For some projects, it may be appropriate to pursue this; for others, the delivery
schedule is more important than the superior solution.
Without good leadership, the team member might be afraid to make this decision. This
usually results in the team member sending emails to peers, managers, stakeholders, and
anyone else she can find, requesting confirmation of absolutely every little decision that
gets made. People quickly get inundated with notes about project details that they lack the
context to even understand.
On the other hand, she may also simply make decisions based on her gut feelings. As the
project progresses, not all of her decisions are in line with the needs of the stakeholders.

For example, she may choose to pursue the superior technical solution at the expense of
the deadline, despite the fact that the stakeholders’ needs would have been just as easily
satisfied had she chosen the faster solution. As these decisions pile up throughout the
course of the project, the scope itself starts to drift away from the organization’s needs.

If there is a serious enough lack of leadership, the project may not even get this far. If the
scope is never fully defined, then the project may have several false starts. Designers and
programmers start building prototypes to demonstrate to stakeholders, only to find that
they have to go back and rebuild them because they misunderstood the project needs.
Work on the code may begin, only to have programmers moved off of the project for
higher priority tasks. People are given conflicting priorities and do not know which one to
work on first. The project takes a long time to emerge from the chaos. Even if a product is

30 CHAPTER TWO