Sunday, January 18, 2009

Project Management in global economy crisis situation..



If you are a software company, depending on outsourced projects from western; USA, Europe, What may come along your way now ?How you should analyze the risk and get prepared to face the worst and still to deliver your projects as planned? Something to think about J
After hearing many things happening in the industry what I can see coming along our way are as follows;

1. Reducing resources of your projects which are in execution. This can happen if you are in to fixed price deals – Customer may ask you to reduce the number of heads in the project. Even internally, due to employee recession and recruitment freeze there will be corporate decisions to reduce the number of resources of your projects.
2. Requests for reducing the cycle time of the project- You may get requests to cut down on processes and documentation. You may get this request very often. A project which you spent 10 months to develop may have to be delivered within 6 months by cutting corners from your lengthy documentation and processes.
3. Even your teams may be over loaded with resources. – If you are in accompany where they have lost few projects due to the situation and still keeping the resources in house due to many reasons, your projects may get overloaded unless they get together and develop a specific product to the market.
4. You may have hear the news all of sudden “ we need to stop this project now because the customer or the investor stopped funding this project” What would be your position as the project Manager?
5. Some of your team members may not in focus and May not in their peak of productivity as they are so concerned about their lost hopes of increments, bonus, and even the stability of the company and their jobs.
6. Quality process may dropped drastically due to all these reasons
7. Sometimes only must have features will be requested.. If you are practicing scrum the product owner may satisfy with the project after first few sprints which delivers his core functionalities
8. You may have to cut down your project budgets dramatically, your team allowances, entertainments, team building activities will be a question mark.

Still you are a lucky PM ? why ? you still have a project to manage with all these problems and test your real PM skills of working under tremendous pressure.. .
As a PM nothing worst than not having any projects in your company to manage J

Lets discuss this further in a future post..

6 comments:

Bas on 3:58 AM said...

Thanks for this great post!

I think one of the biggest challenge at the customer side is the fact that funds are not secured.Normally you could always be sure that budgets were approved/available. Now, nobody doesn't want to take a gamble and funds are froozen.

And our world is a pipeline, so if funds are froozen at one end, the other will feel the effects, sadly.

But we will find a way, always :)

Priyanka Dalal on 9:55 PM said...

Hi,

came across your blog! It has some interesting points about Project Management.

What do you think about project management softwares? I work for a company DeskAway we provide project management and collaboration services.
Do you think these would help with project manager woes in these recession times?

Would love to get your feedback and views.

http://www.deskaway.com

Bond Reeves on 11:13 PM said...

Good subject!!

Whose responsibility is the sales pipeline?

If a company has no projects in their pipeline who to be blamed?

If you are given a chance to take action for the above issues what would you do? Will you downsize the development staff? will you reduce the number of project managers? or ???

Thush on 1:37 AM said...

Hi Shafraz,

thanks for the comments..I think the situation is bit different in this case.. I don’t think we can find anybody to be blamed.. but we may mind many to praise for surviving in this situation.. and still keeping the force with right spirit isn’t it ?
this is a time where corporate needs lots of wise thinking, planning many scenarios to face the difficult situation.. the lay offs and stuff are just options in each scenario based on the balance you need to maintain with the finance model and the project portfolio.

Unknown on 6:20 AM said...

Hello

Nice post. Thanks.

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jane on 6:43 AM said...

Great post. it is true money makes the world go round but at the moment it seems to be stuck. In business I have been forced to make decisions based on financial situations only and am led by money coming in and going out. If only the global leaders could do the same things might not be so bad.

we have had to make decisions to employee an outsourcing tactic to IT people in india rather than employee within our country. it it not easy but the money must dictate how your business runs.

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