EACH JOB HAS A NAME
One of the things we do in my company is to turn around projects that are running out of control. There are basically two phases in doing this. One is to understand why the project is the way it is; the other is to do a new plan (that is, apply Steps 1–5) to take the project from where it is now to where it needs to be. One of the first things we do in trying to understand why the project got into a mess in the first place is to take a look at the current project plan.
Sometimes there isn't one! If that's the case then the investigation is pretty much over.
More often though there is a plan of sorts. That being the case, one of the most common things we find is that jobs don't have people's names against them. What you find instead are things like the following:
and other equally mysterious personages. In other words, the jobs were never assigned to anybody. You might think that people wouldn't be too surprised then if these jobs weren't done. But, invariably, surprised is exactly what they are.
The first thing in assigning people to jobs is that every job must have a human being's name against it. Any of the above or organization names should be avoided as far as is humanly possible. Even if you are subcontracting something so that an organization is actually working on one of the jobs on your project, the name you should have against that job is the member of that organization whose ass is on the line for the successful delivery of that particular job.
It may be that at the beginning of a project you don't know who all the people will be, and that's OK, but then one of your priorities as project manager has to be that the unknowns get replaced by warm, living, loving human beings as quickly as possible.
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