We continue the series of posts about the 6 key factors for the failure of your projects. Last post, we talked about the Spanish Football National Team and the importance of team work in a project’s success. Now we go for the first item of the list: setting the goals as the first step to make a project successful.

Why are goals important?

There are five main reasons:

1. They are the foundation to make decisions in later stages of the project, at the same time that they allow to define what the boundaries of the project are.
2. If they are agreed upon with the customer, then you have taken a step forward for having the customer’s expectations fulfilled.
3. They provide to all members of the team with a clear and well defined target. That’s why it is very important to communicate the project goals to everyone in the team.
4. They constitute the foundation for the subsequent project planning. They help to divide the work into tasks, estimate their duration and assign the tasks to team members. In addition, once the goals are ranked by priority, it is possible to decide what amount of work and effort you want to invest in each one.
5. Having no goals means that it is impossible to monitor the development of a project or even to determine if it is successful after its completion.

How can you set good goals?

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Hi!

Today, I posted for the first time on the Doolphy time on the Doolphy Blog. I wrote about the essential factors that  should guide us to success in project management. This time, we want to vary slightly the approach and analyze the most common mistakes that prevent projects succeed and not conform to expectations in terms of results, term or profitability.

What are the most common errors you should avoid if you want to achieve the expected results in your projects?

1. No defining clearly the project objectives

One of the main causes of project failure is the lack of clear, measurable and attainable objectives. You need to know what you want to achieve to conveniently manage the efforts of all parties involved. It is also essential in this process the customer expectations management, whether internal or external, to ensure that the goals are aligned with what is really expected and ensure their satisfaction with the outcome of the project.

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