Here is another good post from ProjectManager.com
Projectmanager.com provides on their blog regular interesting and useful post on project management. I like them.
It talk about project planning, and proposes 8 key questions that should be asked during project planning.
My favorites in this article are the 2 following: knowing what success is, and discovering your assumptions.
4. How Will You Know if This Project is Successful?
This is a great question to ask that is typically overlooked, that encourages you as the project manager to ‘start out with the end in mind’. Once we have expended all of the effort, energy and resources necessary to complete this project…how will we know it was successful? So many teams find themselves blazing forward without the answer to this question only to find themselves becoming terribly disappointed at the end. Define from the start the measures of project success that you work towards.
5. What Assumptions Have Been Made About this Project?
We’re all familiar with the saying about what happens when you make assumptions. For example, the constraint identified above about the regular testing team may have been an assumption on the part of somebody else. Somebody may have committed to meeting a certain date on the assumption that the team was available. As a project manager it is your responsibility to uncover any assumption and respond to the reality of each situation.
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