10 Ways to keep a project on track
By Bill Gates

My columns about the qualities of good managers and good employees prompted Michael Sullivan of Walt Disney Feature Animation to ask about the qualities of a good project. "You need good employees and a good manager, but a project doesn't exist in a vacuum," Sullivan wrote. "It has to fit in with a company's strategy, work alongside projects from other groups, and someone has to make sure that projects aren't overlapping too much. How do you assess a project's value and how do you keep it on track?"

There are no magic formulas, but I do have a few tips:

1. Choose projects that are large enough to be worthwhile and for which your basic skills qualify you to succeed. Be cautious if a company that has a better combination of capabilities is already ahead of you in the market. Establish a realistic timeline for completion, but not too long. It's tough to maintain freshness and responsiveness when a project goes on for years.

2. Keep the customer clearly in mind. How will customers use your work? Why will it be better than what they had before or the way they worked before?

3. Let employees know the project is important. When everybody understands that they are involved in an endeavor that matters, it builds enthusiasm and a sense of teamwork. It helps people draw on the best of what they have to offer and on the strengths of other good people.

4. Keep employees informed and involved. Everyone working on a project should understand its constraints. It's natural for different people to have different primary concerns because everyone brings individual expertise to a project, but there should be a common sense of the progress that is being made and where the difficult areas are.

5. Meet across boundaries. In well-managed projects, meetings frequently involve people from different disciplines and even different organizations within a company. It's easier to track the status of a project if everybody's talking. Really good managers pick a metric, such as a specific comparison to a competitive product, and really go overboard updating their people on how the product under development measures up. One of the most important status reports is the very last one. Gather everyone and conduct a post mortem. This practice helps the organization learn from its experiences.

6. Keep in touch with the progress and morale of the crew. Do they have common goals? What's their outlook about the project? You can also get indirect insight into how a team feels about a project by monitoring the rate people transfer out to other parts of the company; an exodus suggests trouble.

7. Share the bad news. When parts of a project aren't going well, there must be a willingness to spread the information and get everybody engaged with it. Encountering problems is almost inevitable; failing to recognize and deal with problems is not.

8. Make tradeoff decisions crisply. Minimize the number of big changes during a project, but don't be overly rigid, either. It's vital to be able to adjust to developments in the marketplace or to new goals suggested by customers. Too often, management doesn't really acknowledge the need for trade off. In the software world, for example, if management says, "We want this product to be feature rich and very small and get done overnight, "they're asking for everything with little appreciation of the trade off involved. In contrast, when the need for tradeoffs is acknowledged up front, decision-makers are free to search for the cleverest combination of met and unmet goals.

9. Know when to give up. Sometimes projects that seemed like a good idea when started don't prove to be successful. Recognizing when to give up will be easier if you've established crisp goals and monitor your progress toward them. When you contemplate a risky project, try to hire people who will be useful elsewhere in your organization. That way, if the project doesn't succeed, you can move most of the people to other productive roles.

10. Finally, breed a sense of healthy competitiveness. Performance and satisfaction both rise when there is a competitive spirit.