Project Autopilot

I just glanced through the most recent Costco Connections magazine. There was a recipe for oven pork roast. You preheat the oven to 450 and roast the meat for 20 minutes. After that you reduce the heat to 170 and keep the oven door closed. It said you can leave the roast in the oven for up to 10 hours and when you come home it will be ready.

I don’t know about you but the last thing I’m going to do is leave the oven on when the house is empty. We have a very bright dog but I don’t plan to trust her with handling an issue related to an unattended oven.

As a project manager, do we ever leave the project “in the oven” while we go off to do something else? If so, do we expect the project to be ready for the table when we get back?

What I suggest we do is check the oven from time to time to see how things are going. Is the project cooking too slow or consuming too many resources? Is it where we expect it to be when we do a status check? Do we need to adjust the project oven? Are we getting what we expected? Will the stakeholders be happy when they sit down for your project dinner?

As a project manager we need to keep one phrase foremost in our mind… you must inspect what you expect. Autopilot project management just doesn’t work.

Now I have to run to the kitchen. It sounds like our dog has figured out how to open the oven door!