Chapter 8: Emergency Actions

OVERVIEW

Most of the time, normal project management processes are able to deal with the difficulties that occur in projects. If progress is falling behind, the control system will alert you and you can take corrective action. For example, if the scope is wrong it will be discovered at a functional review and you could take action to revise the scope. However, there are occasions when emergency action is required. This happens when something has gone significantly wrong and has happened in a manner where the normal project process has not alerted you until it is too late to react . In this case you need to put in place a rescue project.

Discovering something has gone badly wrong can be difficult. The reports that you review regularly are summary-level reports . This happens because the volume of work that is required by an advanced project is very large. The large volume of work means that you are unable to understand fully in detail everything that is going on at every moment in time. Instead you have to concentrate on the critical activities and problem areas. As a result, unless the reporting alerts you to a problem then you will assume there are no problems. Unfortunately, reporting sometimes fails. When this happens you need to be prepared. Preparation involves examining four areas in relation to the advanced project being managed:

• working out that things have gone wrong;

• setting up a rescue project;

• working through the available options;

• controlling the rescue project.

This can be considered more simply as: symptoms, implementation, options and control. Preparing these four areas in advance will ensure that when things go wrong you are ready and able to take immediate action.