We all know the old saying, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?”
Answer: Practice, practice, practice.
U.S. President Barack Obama often likes to talk about, “teachable moments.” In the end, the demise of BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico is probably going to provide enough lessons learned to fill an entire university, complete with a broad array of subjects.
What can project managers learn from this disaster? In short, plenty.
Whether or not you’re going into unchartered waters (no pun intended), if your project is mission critical and / or has never been done before; you as project manager have a lot more responsibility than just any other ordinary project.
You’re going to want to take some precautions so no one ever starts a “day counter” of how long it’s been since you screwed up along with a live 24/7 camera feed documenting every second of just how badly you continue to wreck the lives of thousands of people every minute of every day.
One of those precautions is practice (practice, practice). Having your team conduct mock drills or even real ones, if possible will reveal where you have room for improvement.
Ideally every tool you would have at your disposal in a real disaster you should have in your dry run. The execution should be the same.
So if that days ever comes where it is no longer an academic exercise you will hopefully have far fewer problems than BP and get your life back faster than Tony Hayward and have your reputation in-tact and possibly even stronger.
Have you ever conducted a mock drill? How did go? What did you learn? Did the event ever happen for real? How prepared is your company in the event of disaster? Are your employees educated on your company’s disaster recovery (DR) plans? Do they have one?
Please share your stories.
Tags: PM Fundamentals, Project Planning
Thanks,
This combination of environmentally-cautioning and risk-conscious project management is of extreme interest to us at EarthPM. In fact you’ll find several other postings like yours on our site, including one called, Can You Learn From Lessons Past? You Bet Your BP You Can
Keep up the good work!
having projects the second time around is tougher and needs to deal with a higher expectations from the client, This is just another round of defends and proofs, with a total renewed package to cater, But its a lot more convenient to work , you got all your resources ready, all you have to do is make a twist with the strategy and a full blast.