About PMI Vancouver Island

Our main goals are:

• To support the professional development of our members, and,
• To advance the discipline of Project Management on Vancouver Island, both in the workplace and community.

PMI-VI was founded in 1996 by a small group of 46 dedicated individuals and has grown at a steady rate to about 500 members currently.

Over 50% of our members are certified Project Management Professionals (PMPs). We are fortunate to have dedicated members who are very active in the local community and continue to contribute to our profession year after year.

About the Back From Red Presentation:

Estimates for the annual cost of project failure are as high as two-trillion dollars a year.  The rates for projects being at risk are in the 60-70% range, and a quarter of all project's problems are so bad they are simply canceled prior completion. However, moving from a 60% failure rate to 0% is unrealistic.  Before organizations can succeed at reducing project failure rate, they must understand what makes their projects fail.  Reasons range from methodology to human failure to poorly understood concepts to scope creep. Analyzing projects as systems uncovers all the factors that can contribute to failure.

This presentation describes the key elements in recovering Red Projects from a system approach—looking at all the contributing factors.  It is based on the process that Mr. Williams developed while recovering dozens of projects. It covers:

• The prerequisites for a recovery: The Steering Committee’s responsibilities in realizing there is a problem to be solved.
• The four-step process to recover a project:
  • Audit: The unbiased acquisition of data about the organization, customer, people and the project.
  • Analysis: Analyzing the data to determine root cases of problems and developing a recovery plan and corrective actions.
  • Negotiation: Arriving at an acceptable solution for both the supplier and the customer.
  • Execute: Implementing the plan and corrective actions.
• The major ways to keep projects from failing.

The recovery process focuses the work one must do in dealing with the Red Project—the dynamics of the team, stakeholders and executives.  Management style and technique are very important in the recovery and multiple tips will be provided on being a leader. It also discusses the role of Technology and the Methodology in the failure.

There are multiple case study examples drawn from a variety of projects to reinforce the concepts.