In a world where everyone is giving incredibly helpful advice that most of people ignore and walk, zombie-like, into failure, rather like some of the scenarios in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, so we thought it would be more fun to help speed up the process and provide you with helpful guidance on how to pass by the opportunity for success and head straight for failure.
These are the best ideas that our team have been able to come up with that will help guarantee failure where possible and remove any optimism from the outset.
- Ideally, don’t let anyone know the project is active, hopefully you will be able to fail without anyone noticing or caring.
- If your project does come to light by accident, overwhelm everyone with information on a daily (if possible) basis, hopefully they will quickly get bored and miss the important information. Eventually resulting in them asking you to leave them off of the distribution list.
- Ignore any questions and comments from troublemakers and certainly don’t give them the impression that you value feedback.
- If you need to communicate, create complicated messages with lots of detail about what the project will do so that that outcomes are really unclear
- Don’t bother to identify the stakeholders or segment the target audience, send the same information to everyone, it’s the only fair way to proceed and it saves time.
- The quickest communication methods (i.e. email) are the best, are always popular.
- Avoid the most important stakeholders – they probably won’t be interested anyway and you don’t want them remembering you for the wrong reasons.
If you would rather be successful, why not check out our video and make a start on our Project Management Fundamentals course on Stakeholder Engagement and Communications.