The Top 5 Things You Need to Meet a Tight Project Deadline
It’s ok; take all the time you need. Go at your own pace. Relax, take a break and come back fresh. Sleep on it. I don’t know about you, but I know my work environment isn’t like this! Does anyone have the luxury of sleeping on anything but their desk when they pass out from exhaustion after working 18 hours? Who goes at their own pace? No one. And that’s exactly why we have deadlines. They are a necessary evil – or a huge benefit, depending on how you look at it. They are also highly variable. When you are working under a tight deadline, what helps get things moving in the right direction?
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In one instance, I came into a big project at the end of May. The client needed the project completed by December. Great, seven months! But many of the major deliverables were seriously behind and the project team had been re-planning for six weeks, the project was in a state of paralysis. Not to brag about myself, but we got it done. It was a matter of working with, not against, the pressure and getting organization into the project by:
- Clarifying requirements. What do we need to do here? What do you need to do?
- Tapping into the best brains in the organization
- Creating a sense of team cohesion and bringing individuals together to work towards the common goals
- Getting senior level executives involved in the process
- Creating an escalation process that involved those higher level executives
The last item on the list is arguably the most important. When senior level executives are involved in projects (on a “sponsor” level, not a micromanager level), it greatly increases the chance of success. One step that can help immensely is creating an escalation process that involves these decision-makers, or authorizing agents so no problem goes a full 24 hours without being resolved.
Most of the time, executives want a project to go well, be done on time, and stay on budget, but that’s the extent of their involvement. If there is a problem, they want the managers to solve it, not bump it up the ladder. Creating a situation, however, in which executives are available to make decisions to streamline the processes and answer questions that can free up workflow is essential. This will really provide the cement the team needs to accomplish their objectives. Executives need to have transparency into the project decision-making process
