All projects are supposed to be temporary but we all know just how many projects continue to live on.  And I don’t mean live on in our hearts and memories, but celebrate birthdays and anniversaries type live on.  This means that any given project will have a high likelihood of running through various project managers.  Seamless transition of projects from one PM to another is critical not just to maintain project momentum but also to keep both PMs motivated.  Further, it is a great opportunity for the team, especially the sponsors, to re-align expectations, to shift any strategy that has not been working successfully and to emphasize continuation of those strategies that have worked.

Often some PMs get excited about leaving their existing projects to pursue new ones, thus leaving the transitioning-in PM perplexed and crying mercy.  Here’s a suggested checklist of transitional items both PMs might want to explore to enable a successful and seamless transition:

  • Provide a helicopter view of the project, its predecessors and successors, its past, present and future. Aim of this is to allow someone new to the project to grasp the big picture and understand where and how this particular project fits in the larger scheme of things.
  • Provide functional overview – what are the main needs, requirements and goals this project aims to address
  • Provide project status (including but not limited to issues, action items, risks) and share some lessons learned in managing the project thus far
  • Provide team overview (Objective) – which teams are involved, how many resources are there, how are they allocated and who are the team leads if applicable.
  • Provide team overview (Subjective) – which teams or team members work well independently vs. which require continuous follow up.  Any team that has consistently been late, blocked or resource starved?
  • Provide architecture/infrastructure/technical overview if applicable
  • Provide stakeholder/sponsor overview (Objective and Subjective) – who are the stakeholders and sponsors, what are their expectations, how easy or difficult are they to manage, what matters to them most (quality, timely delivery, frequent status updates, preference for details or high levels)
  • Information on continuation of existing meetings

By no means is this list exhaustive, but just a compilation of things that came to mind at the time of writing.  Please feel free to add to this.  Once there is some input from others, I’ll summarize the checklist items in a word document under the Templates or Wiki section.

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