Strategic Project Management Made Simple, 2nd Edition

9Getting Your Project Off the Ground

Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning.

—Winston Churchill

If you read this book with a specific project in mind and are eager to get started, this chapter lays the groundwork to move your project into action.

One of the most important first steps is to examine the project from a strategic, business, technological, cultural, and political perspective. This understanding will serve you well.

Now is the time to begin putting your core team together, developing relationships with key stakeholders, socializing your project ideas, and preparing for two key meetings: a project design workshop where the LogFrame will be assembled, and a project kickoff meeting at which it is presented.

You will find a case study on how to refresh or pivot your strategy. This method applies to all strategic planning, strategy refinement, and organization improvement initiatives.

Move from Storming to Performing

We all want to launch our projects rapidly and gain high momentum early. But we also know successful fast launches are rare. What is it that causes launch failures, and what can we do to avoid it? To understand this phenomenon, we turn to psychologist Bruce Tuckman's classic model of team development, shown in Figure 9.1.

Tuckman identified five development stages that teams go through to deliver results. He labeled these stages Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing, and Adjourning.

In the Forming stage, there is uncertainty and ...