Showing Your Team What Urgent Looks Like

Showing Your Team What Urgent Looks Like

There is a critical path to all situations. The Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) defines the critical path as "the sequence of schedule activities that determines the duration of the project." In other words, all projects should have a plan and all team members should follow that plan. The critical path is basically all the tasks involved that determine the final end date of the project. Every time there is a slip and these tasks are postponed the project will be that much later on moving forward to its completion. Successful project managers focus their energy on evaluating what needs to be done, and consider more alternatives, to ensure those critical paths are made shorter to prevent delays.

In the situation where the engineering and operations department of an equipment manufacture was working on new product testing had run into critical dates not being met. With this delay at hand, the project manager was in dire need of coming up with ideas to make the deadline of the Beta shipment date. It was now up to the project manager to show their team what urgent looks like.

After a brief analysis, the team was able to look back and observe that, even though they were working hard, they had started treating deadlines as unimportant. As the team looked forward these deadlines were made more clear as to why they where necessary. With a better understanding, the team was more willing to try new approaches to the urgency of the project’s deadlines.

The first issue that was examined was the management of testing the new product. The team had discovered that the company lacked a formal testing group with no written schedules or a defined completion and pass criteria. It was going to be crucial for the project manager to make sure the team came up with frequent testing deadlines and to stick to them. These deadlines would help keep the team continually aware of any problems and they would able to fix these problems quickly before getting out of hand.

The second issue resulted from the investigation of the testing concern. Previously, the team had only relied on technicians performing generic testing of new systems instead of appointing a testing leader to only focus on the project in sight. Among many responsibilities, this leader would be able to keep testing tasks on schedule and correct any defects quickly to stay on track.

Being quite aware,