Here are the best and worst practices of project leaders as told to us by participants in our project leadership workshops. It’s interesting that this list is different than most best-practices lists, yet these are the topics that are on the minds of people working to improve their project results. Do your leaders do these things?

Quality Planning

Good Schedules - This includes realism of commitments, accurate work-scope estimates, reliability of task descriptions, and accurate and complete identification of project dependencies.

Clear Tasks – Explicit ownership of tasks (no ‘group’ ownership), clear and concise instructions for work-products, and follow through on every project task.

Managed Risks – Conscientious initial definition of risks. Follow through with identification and management of new and ongoing risks. No risks arbitrarily hidden from the team.

Great Management

Lead the Team – Focus on important issues looking ahead into the project, grow team morale, be an employee advocate, motivate the team, and insure that the team and each individual understand why their work is important.

Manage the Work – Manage conflicts to insure progress and minimize ineffective use of meeting time. Assure the cooperation of the team members. Hire appropriate people. Understand the business, technologies, the product, and the project.

Bad Planning

A Rosy-Faced Plan – Managers who tell everyone that the project is in much better shape than it actually is. Misleading with optimism; often accompanied by withholding information.

Size Mismatch – Running a small project within a big-project organization and encumbering it with the overhead and requirements that are needed for large projects. Large-project methods have their place, but not in small teams. We like skunk works.

Legacy – Leadership that is too tied into the old products and the old way of doing things. This is a tricky product planning and business tradeoff, worthy of a newsletter of its own.

Poor Management

Details – Some managers get lost in the details of the implementation and don’t manage. Businesses always want hands-on managers and supervisors, but there is a limit. Some leaders are so uncomfortable in their leadership role that they will jump into the details to avoid leading the team.

Postmortem Results – Leaders that hold postmortem meetings after most projects, listen to the same issues every time, and never solve the problems. Ok, they probably are tough problems. But if you aren’t going to fix them, don’t waste the teams’ time re-listing them after every project.

Rigid Leaders – These are rigid ‘command and control’ leaders who don’t like criticism and don’t listen. There are a few special circumstances that demand command and control, but those are only a tiny percent of all projects. Listening and understanding are required.