The Project Book

CHAPTER 49 DEAL WITH ISSUES

Left unchecked, issues (like risks) have the ability to kill your project off quickly. Not only that, but if you don’t have mechanisms in place to control their impact they can give you sleepless nights and even affect you personally.

The project management method PRINCE2 defines an issue as ‘a relevant event that has happened, was not planned, and requires management action. It can be any concern, query, request for change, suggestion or off-specification raised during a project. Project issues can be about anything to do with the project’.

Issues can relate to people, the things you’re building, money or the suppliers you’re using. Like managing risks, managing issues is a key requirement of a project manager.

To be able to manage them, you first need to know about them. That sounds obvious, I know, but I’ve known project managers who have been unapproachable, which has led the team either to try to work around them or, worse, not to tell them of any problem.

If you’ve read this book sequentially and have decided to practise everything you’ve read in chapters 1 through 41 (good for you, by the way), then approachability is not going to be an issue. If not, you’ll need to work on this quickly. Only once you know about an issue can you act on it, and act you must.

It is essential that you seek to clarify the problem and identify its root cause, which may not be as easy as it first seems. You’ll need to draw on the people closest to the problem to ...