Network professionals let you in on their secrets to project management success.

  What's the difference between
  projects that fail and those that
  succeed?

  According to veteran project manager Ed Esposito, it
  boils down to the difference between traditional project
  management, which focuses on administrative tasks,
  and proactive project management, which is about
  mitigating risk.

  "With traditional project management, you make a
  formal project plan and then have a lot of meetings to
  report status. Proactive project management always
  looks out to future milestones, identifies the risks and
  puts together a contingency plan," says Esposito,
  director of IT services for health insurance firm Blue
  Cross/Blue Shield of Massachusetts in Boston.

  Esposito should know. His group has just finished a
  complex network upgrade on time and on budget. With
  the help of outsourcer Inacom of Omaha, Neb., the
  20-person team upgraded a Fast Ethernet LAN to a
  mixture of Gigabit Ethernet and SONET and replaced
  the Hewlett-Packard OpenMail system with Microsoft
  Exchange. What's more, the company rolled out 3,500
  new PCs as part of a standardization effort. With the
  LAN upgrade complete, the company is ready for the
  next step of NextGenBlue, a massive enterprisewide
  network overhaul to support emerging business
  applications.

  The basics of good project management are well
  known: Get buy-in from management and users,
  communicate project goals, set a critical path, manage
  deviations from that path, and above all, pray. But
  seasoned project pros also have a number of tricks up
  their sleeves to help keep their plans on track. Here are
  some of the best project management tips from the
  trenches:

  Get help when you need it. Like Blue Cross/Blue
  Shield, many companies attempt to mitigate risk by
  calling in an outsourcer to perform the upgrade while
  maintaining control of the overall project, says Steve
  Furman, vice president at Robbins-Gioia, a project
  management consulting firm in Alexandria, Va.

  Train project management neophytes. They need
  to learn how to set milestones, approach problems
  analytically and create contingency plans before they
  can take the reins for the first time, Furman says.

  Pick the most user-friendly tool you can find.
  Many project management packages are extremely
  robust and are designed to handle multiyear software
  development projects. If you're in charge of a simple
  network upgrade, you won't need - or want - that
  degree of power.

  At Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Linda Murawski used
  Microsoft Project 98 to keep on track. Although it's not
  yet Web-based, the tool is totally intuitive for Windows
  users, says Murawski,who is director of IT operations
  for the insurance company. And Project 98's
  dependency-management capability was critical for
  risk management. For example, the team was
  contractually obligated to finish upgrading its pharmacy
  management software prior to beginning the rest of the
  project. If the pharmacy rollout had not gone as
  planned, it would have affected the rest of the project.

  Don't make people jump around. In recent years, it
  has become popular to have team members work on
  whatever task was the highest priority at the time,
  changing tasks many times throughout the course of
  the project. This is the wrong way to go, Furman says.
  "The efficiency factor drops dramatically when people
  hop around."

  Completing a long-term project requires each team
  member be singularly focused for long periods of time,
  he says. And that's exactly what Blue Cross/Blue
  Shield did. "We had assigned roles and responsibilities
  that held throughout the project," Murawski says. "It
  doesn't make sense to jump people with a particular
  skill level to where they may not have the appropriate
  skills."

  Involve suppliers early in project planning. "We're
  seeing supply chain management becoming an integral
  part of the network upgrade project. Vendors have to
  be involved early on to ensure they can meet the needs
  of the project," Furman says. Blue Cross/Blue Shield's
  outsourcer ensured vendors could meet the deadlines
  well in advance.

  Do estimates from the ground up. Most projects
  have a budget and time line that was to some degree
  fixed by senior management. Don't just leave it at that,
  Furman says. Throughout the duration of the project,
  have all team members continually validate or adjust
  the dates. Otherwise, you'll be stuck with unrealistic
  goals.

  Keep users involved every step of the way.
  Esposito and Murawski involved key users from all of
  the business units in the planning stages. In addition, no
  segment of the project was considered finished until it
  had been tested and signed off on by those same users.

  Focus on the good. Pressed for time, most project
  managers manage their projects by exception reporting
  (i.e., "Tell me if something is wrong.") Enlightened
  project managers encourage their team members to
  discuss things that work and to share knowledge and
  best practices.