It cannot happen on my project....

How often have you heard this on a project "if we had just taken care of this little thing, our project would have succeeded." In my experience, both as project manager and a team member, on some projects I have noticed that trivial issues bog down the progress. Although it may seem like a case of hindsight being 20:20, I feel that those issues can be prevented with some common sense preventive (pro-active) actions. Here is one such example:

On a business critical project where the organization did not have any prior experience implementing new software, a common sense approach should have been to have the software vendor accountable for implementation. However, when few initial milestones (provided by software vendor) were missed, it was assumed that the end date will be met through super-human efforts. This was a folly that resulted in additional milestones being missed and as expected dented confidence of end-user community in the project itself. At this point, project sponsor challenged the project management group (including the software vendor leadership) to re-baseline the project and build a closed-loop control mechanism to always keep the project on-track. The control mechanism (comprising of exception reports, clear metrics definition, etc.) should alert senior management in case of abnormal situations.

Although a simple example of a project being led by some smart project managers and yet, these issues were observed. Sometimes smart project managers are afflicted by the bug ‘it cannot happen on my project’ that breeds complacency and hence undesirable results.