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Project Management Best Practices (continued)

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According to Davidson, the project manager must meet with each team member on a regular basis to achieve this. Every team member must be asked what roadblocks they anticipate, if they're on track with goals and milestones, and what kind of support they need. "The onus is on the team member to ask for support, and to pick up the slack if they didn't ask for support and are creating a roadblock," he says.

A chart that plots the entire project "works so well that you don't have to even talk about needing to stay on track," Davidson says. He cautions that when working with talented people, project managers should be on the lookout for overconfidence, which may lead team members to understate the amount of time a task will take. The best method for addressing this tendency is to allocate about 25 percent more time than the team member(s) estimate. "If they think it's going to take ten hours, you should budget twelve-and-a-half hours," he says.

Create a Risk Plan
Rick Brenner of Chaco Canyon Consulting in Cambridge, Mass., argues that the key factor in developing a plan and ensuring that the team members will stay on track and on time is a good risk plan. A risk plan is an examination of what could go wrong during the project, and the costs in time and money to correct for those things.

"You hardly ever see one," says Brenner. "There's a certain reluctance to look at the dark side, and project managers are uncomfortable thinking about risk in general." The risk plan will, most importantly, factor in turnover effects -- the impact, for example, of unexpectedly needing to train new personnel or outsource tasks or positions. (article continues)

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