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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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
First you need to gather more information about the company culture and environment, the information systems, and the technologies that used by the company. Then look carefully for the project charter and understand it very well, If you have some issue with it, try to meet with the project sponsor to discuss it. Then hold a meeting with the team to get a buy in with them and to focus more in their capabilities to associate with you to deliver the planned product by focusing into the project management plan.
