- Make the customer work for you – the focus on keeping the project sponsor and customer team focused and engaged on the project by strategically assigning tasks throughout the engagement
- Let the team manage the budget – let the team know how critical the budget is and how closely you’ll be monitoring it and you’ll find that they will actually ‘help’ you manage it by keeping expenses and time charging in line with budget expectations
In this Part 3, we’ll examine the idea of wisely scaling the project deliverables to match the size of the project, the visibility or criticality of the project, and the needs of the project customer.
The smart project manager considers the type of project at hand once it’s been assigned. Is the budget large? Is this a long-term, mission-critical project? Is this a key, strategic project for my organization and/or my customer? The answer to these questions should drive some of the early project planning such as how much time is devoted to planning documents, requirements analysis, and user acceptance testing (UAT), for example.