Have you rotated your project’s tires?

A standard semi-annual ritual for many who live in cold climates is swapping all season to winter tires on our cars and back again. This exercise also presents a good opportunity to catch up on any other outstanding preventative maintenance for our vehicles.  For those of us who live in places which observe daylight savings time, we are reminded to change the batteries in our smoke alarms whenever our clocks spring forward or fall back.

Here are a few questions to consider if its been a while since you’ve performed preventative maintenance on your projects.

What’s the what? It can be too easy to have our heads down and keep executing the project, but what if there have been some shifts in the environment which have eroded the project’s benefits? While this isn’t a primary responsibility for most project managers, ignoring expected outcomes might be considered negligence.

How’s the how? Assuming we are comfortable with the project’s objectives, are the solution and delivery approaches still viable? If we chose an adaptive approach, is that still the best choice? Are there any early warning signs that solution design or architecture might be flawed and should be revisited? Is there any waste that’s been introduced in our product or project processes which could be eliminated?

Risks revisited? If its been a few weeks since the contents of the risk register have been reviewed chances are some new risks could be identified and the assessment of older ones might need to be refreshed. It’s also a good practice to periodically assess the effectiveness of risk responses and see if any key assumptions made to date can be confirmed.

Stakeholders surveyed? Similar to the risk register, if there are cobwebs on your stakeholder register you’d likely want to see if any new stakeholders have emerged and whether the attitude, interest and power of existing stakeholders remains the same. How effective have your stakeholder engagement strategies been to date and do they need to be adjusted?

Team thriving? When’s the last time you did a pulse check on the health of your team? Was your last team building activity months ago? Even if no one has joined or left the team, you need to regularly monitor team morale and provide opportunities for individual and team development.

Lessons learned? Has any new knowledge been identified, curated and most important, disseminated and learned? Even on projects following a traditional delivery approach, the team should regularly reflect back on what has been learned to help them and others improve.

Ignoring such good practices won’t usually cause immediate issues but paying down project management debt gets costlier the longer you wait!