Customer centricity is being embraced in all aspects of business like moving to a customer centric organization, customer centric design, in sales, marketing etc. It is only a click away to amazon.com to understand the benefits of being customer centric. It is being fully realized now what Mahatma Gandhi said about customers and I quote

Even though “it’s all about people” people management is one of the major areas over looked in a team resulting in project failures. The following are some of the people management aspects which every manager needs to practice for any undertaking to be successful

Having executed and helped turn around multiple projects under stress, the following are few common themes which I have seen resulting in projects getting into stress. Even though they are common sense and simple things, quiet often they are overlooked by the project team.

Once it is determined that the current organizational capabilities are not sufficient to execute and deliver a project successfully, organizations need to procure the required capabilities from the vendors. This process involves vendor selection including solicitation of information from vendors like their capabilities, references, cost etc, shortlisting of vendor(s) and having a contract with vendor(s) to provide the capabilities. During the process the symptoms which highlight risks can vary based on the specific capability being procured. We will look at some of the common risk symptoms not related to the capabilities being procured that can impact the project success.

Once a project is selected, a project manager is assigned to execute and deliver the business value. The project manager may or may not be involved in the project selection process like in the case of a service provider organization, the the project manager may not have been involved in the sales cycle of getting the project. There are many risk items which can be overlooked at this phase which can lead to a project failure. Assigning a project manager who doesn’t have the skills required for the project is a major one.