3-day Virtual Seminar

Reading the Tea Leaves: Predicting a Project's Future

Overview

Every project is unique, but when they start to go off the rails, many of their symptoms rhyme. Is your project encountering challenges?  Do you know the root causes of the issues and possible remedies? 

In the real project world, any project can fail to deliver on its original commitments, and many do.  

Consulting project manager Payson Hall has conducted numerous project reviews and has noticed patterns that can help identify and address many issues before they become disasters. The goal of this session is to help you learn lessons hard won by others so that you don't have to re-learn them yourselves on your projects.

Why you should Attend

Is a project's fate preordained? Does a project's past suggest its likely future? Can anything be done to influence that future when the current signs aren't promising?  

Payson Hall has participated in and reviewed many projects during his 40-year career. In this session, without claiming mystical powers, Payson shares problem symptoms observed on projects in both the public and private sectors and discusses patterns of project problems and strategies for isolating and correcting them.  

Payson will help you learn to identify "problem seeds" that can grow into larger issues over time, and gain insights into next steps that can favorably influence your project's future. For example, when a task exceeds its planned duration, questions that might help

identify the cause include: 

• Are the people assigned to the task working on something else?  
• Has the schedule shifted the task into scheduled holidays, training, or vacations?  
• Has resource consumption been consistent with earlier estimates?  
• Are tasks blocked awaiting information, materials, or approvals?  
• Was the work clearly defined to begin with?

During the talk, Payson will also introduce a diagnostic tool (distributed during the webinar) that helps identify next steps in an investigation to identify root causes of project issues being observed and identify possible remedies to common problems.

Areas Covered in the Session

• Does predicting a project's future require mysticism or science?
• Learning to be a better predictor
• Tips for visualizing metrics to identify patterns
• Using metrics to support project controls
• How to be a project detective
• Introduction to a diagnostic tool that will be distributed during the webinar

Who Will Benefit

• This Session is Particularly Focused on Project Managers and Senior Project Team Members