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The situation becomes abnormal in a project. Due certain conditions and poor management and leadership a new PM was assigned to replace the old Project Management Team. This is huge challenge for you as the new PM. But given the worst condition of the Project, the Upper Management have a trust on you to deliver the project.
First: Hand over project documentations, read and understand documentation very well.
Ex: Business case documents, Contracts and Agreements, Project Scope, project plan and stakeholder analysis, procurements documents, project log and report etc...
Second: Review and Analysis Performance reports, Status report, progress report .
Third: Review and Analysis Financial documents, payments and Collections and bills and any commitments.
Forth: Meet with key stakeholders and figure if there are any pints to focus through take over project
(Meet with following: General Manager, Projects Director, Financial Manager, Operation manager, Project team, Clients team any subcontractors and current project manager) .
Fifth: Prepare a hand over report and this report to include:
List of project documents you got from all parties.
Identify exactly what is done in project. you can use EVM.
Clarify if the project behind the schedule budget or scope.
Identify any new risk or potential change request you discover through take –over project.
Share Hand over with internal key stakeholder and may be with project team and better to get signature
Of all internal key stakeholder.
Then start your project management process AFTER Project Sponsor sending officially Memo or Email to all party to tell them you are the new project manager and what is you privileges in the project .
This is the list of things I need to do:
1 - Gather project documents: Legal contracts with outsource and sub contracts, Project Charter, Project Plan, WBS, Change requests, Completion Certificates if any.
2 - Get360 view from both top management and project old team: PAIN POINTS, as is progress and milestone status, completion percentage, dependencies and obstacles.
3 - Budget and time lag: how serious project budget is bleeding and how far we are behind the schedule.
4 - Conclude basic estimation of required resource to complete the project and verify them with both top management and old team.
I suggest that you start by understaning the approved project goals, meet the project's team and get them to report the project's status as they see it and assess their sutability, study and evaluate the approved project plan.
This will mostly take place in derailed projects, I will be very caucious for change and risk management aspects of the project.
Review Project Plan as per current status.
Collect all requirements, SOW, deliverables as per current status, verify delvierables as per the stakeholder requrements.Identify all the stakeholders and get the inputs from them.
Arrange kick off meeting with management and old PM team and clear the true status and pending delvierable of project.
First let me tell you that changing a PM is itself a big risk to the project, and often the companies don’t have good hiring policy, system of human resourcing have incompatible staff. Hence it becomes necessary at sometimes to change the PM. But, if I were to hand over a project after its start, I would (as Eyad said) ask the management to provide me a true status of the project, reports of at least for the last8 weeks, risk register and stakeholder management plan
analyse,investigate,communicate,delegate,get upper management commitment,restructure,approve restructuring plans,set up a commited team,proceed with caution and keep advancing,benchmark and measure improvement against project set strategy and procesures,recalibrate operations.
You need to review the project charter, the contract and analyze stakeholders.
Finally, meet the project sponsor then the project team in order to understand what was done so far and what went wrong.
First know your Team. Second know your Project through available resources/documentation and then use your knowledge/skills/expertise to identify way forward.
I would do a SWOT analisys, with emphasis on weak and strong points. This will offer a good enough idea on the strategy to follow.
kick off meeting
I would check the following as a new PM assigned: Gather all critical Project related documents such as Project Charter, SOW to check what is expected to be delivered, Stakeholder Register and Management Strategy to see if all stakeholders had been properly identfied and effective stakeholder management strategy had been devised, WBS, Legal contracts, Completion certificates, Change Requests and How Project changes are managed, Risk register and risk management strategy, track financial and overall progress, time lags and major constraints etc
Then interact with senior Management, Customer and Project Sponsor to find out how much support the Project have amongst them and how important is the project, what are their concerns, Organization culture and reasons for their loss of confidence in previous project team.
Also interactaction with previous Project team may help to find out reasons of their failure to deliver, team buy-in, if team had correct composition, motivation, SMEs, check what are their views on failure to deliver etc
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