Do you know the HIPPO? not the hippopotamus animal, it is a different HIPPO, a HIPPO is an acronym that stands for a “Highest Paid Person’s Opinion” or “Highest Paid Person in Organization”, whether you work in a small or gigantic enterprise, you will always find a HIPPO (aka CEO) around, chances are you will be invited to a meeting to take a critical decision that may impact your project or sometimes the entire organization, and so the decision will hit your project either positively or negatively. in this post you will learn 5 ways to influence a HIPPO.

If you work on IT projects and have not heard about Marketecture before this is a must read for you, Marketecture (Marketing Architecture) is a very common technique that most of vendors use to market and sell their products, in Marketecture, marketing people use the architectural advantages of a product to tout it and influence the client’s decision to buy the product, often times Marketecture is planned in the very early stages of the product planning and prior to the product build, as a project manager you have to protect your project from Marketecture, read on to know how Marketecture works and what precautions you can take to avoid falling in the Marketecture trap.

In part three we will examine a very interesting root cause which will make a lot of people scratch their heads, it is Project Manager, yes the project manager is one of the root causes why projects fail, while from the first look this may seem awkward as so many people will simply say that projects fail when there is no project manager, however in my humble opinion a considerable percentage of projects fail because of poor project management, let’s see the sub causes.

Initiating is one of the most overlooked phases of a project lifecycle (so as is Closing), you have to keep in my mind that if you start wrong, chances are you will end wrong, just like a building’s foundation, if the foundation is not solid the building may collapse any time before or after completing the building, same thing applies to any project, the problem with initiating phase is that it is mostly handled without the project manager, most of project sponsor start appointing a project manager only when the project is approved and after the business case, if there is any, has been built.

If you google “why projects fail” you will get about 10 million results, which implies an undeniable fact, that is projects do fail, as per the study conducted by the Standish group (2004 edition), 18% of projects are considered failed (cancelled before completion), 53% of projects have been tagged as “challenged” (over budget and/or overtime and/or not meeting quality requirements), typically 43% of projects are delivered over budget and 82% exhibit schedule slippage.

PERT is a technique to depict project activities and to calculate duration of each activity keeping uncertainty/risk in mind, PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique) was first develop in fifties (1950s), as a method to estimate activity duration, it is often referred to as PERT Chart, PERT uses indeterministic methodology to calculate duration, by trying to anticipate three estimates, worst case scenario represented by pessimistic value or longest duration an activity will take to finish, best case scenario represented by optimistic value or shortest duration an activity will take to finish, third factor is the most likely estimate, the 3 factors feed into a formula which takes probability into consideration to calculate the duration of the activity, the formula is: