Apologies to all (if any of you are out there :-/) for the extended silence on my blog… Work, amongst other things in my personal life, have taken a bit of a priority. Perhaps its time for a new post to freshen things up. So, here we go…

After spending some time considering some of the most important principles to enforce and variables to track on an IT project, I outlined a condensed list that unknowingly shuffled around spells out ATTACK – rather fitting perhaps, then again slightly humurous…

Below is a breakdown of each letter in the acronym and how you can apply them in your project.

Accountability

Accountability is essentially your key catalyst towards getting things done. Making project participants accountable for their deliverables fuses their career progress/security with their ability to deliver to what they commit to.

Traceability

What good is a project manager/director without an ability to trace historical events for auditing, planning and confirming the validity of planned tasks ahead. Saving every email, document and meeting minute you come across can help you leverage that historical knowledge and align your team in the directions that were originally planned.

Transparency

Project transparency to key project stakeholders is critical. Visibility on he current state of a project’s budget, time line, resources and planning is crucial for the team to align and also provide the necessary feedback/input to help direct each others decisions.

Accelerate

Moving at an accelerated pace goes hand-in-hand with being constantly paranoid about the condition of a project – paranoia, in a positive sense however. If you are paranoid about the progress of a specific task, it proactively forces you to accelerate your pace and move faster than you are typically acclimated to.

Commitment

Commitment is part of remaining motivated on a project. When motivation is low, your commitment can easily degrade and performance within a project can quickly deteriorate. To maintain commitment within the team, it is important to strengthen everyone’s motivation and “positive vibe” – this is part of knowing how to effectively manage and communicate top-down as a project manager/director.

KPIs

No project should move forward without tracking Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Anything from the performance of project participants to, budget/resource metrics – all of it helps. This gives you the reporting you need as a project manager/director to quickly act on weak areas in your project and also provide reporting to project sponsors/management.