INTRODUCTION

Your job as a project leader involves repeating these first eight steps of structured project management until the project is complete. How often do you do this? Every month? Every day? Every hour? In Chapter 12 I will talk about how to spread your time across projects, but basically the answer is yes! Every month, every day, every hour “ as often as it takes to get the job done. This means that:

• Everyone is permanently focused on the goal. The team members have heard the dream, the vision, so often that any one of them could give your speech!

• You are using your list of jobs, your plan, like a steering compass, pushing on to each new horizon. This means that you are constantly scanning the plan, adding new jobs as unexpected things arise, changing the nature of jobs as more information about them becomes available, marking jobs off as they complete, deleting jobs if you find they are now no longer relevant and moving people to where they are most effective. At all times you are using the style most appropriate to the situation.

• You are checking to ensure that there is one and only one leader on the project.

• You are constantly thinking of the expectations you have set and considering fallback positions . Each job has associated with it an expectation and a fallback position, and it may be possible to fall back on a number of these without affecting the overall project.

• You are out in front scouting, scanning the horizon for danger, asking "what can go wrong?" Behind you, you know what progress the team is making and you report back to them of new perils , obstacles, challenges ahead.