Project Success, Measuring Outcomes VS Outputs

Web polls and surveys are still showing a high number of projects defined as a failure. People responding in the recent Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) poll listed communication as the number one cause of failure. The 2007 study by Dynamic Markets Limited shows that 62% of organizations experience IT projects that failed to meet their schedule, 41% failed to deliver the expected business value and ROI, and 47% had higher-than-expected maintenance costs. The Standish Group reports that 51% of IT projects are defined as “challenged”, where they had cost overruns, time overruns, and not supportable as delivered. They also reported that 31% were cancelled outright. Gartner studies suggest that 75% of all US IT projects are considered to be failures by those responsible for initiating them.

I believe a large chunk of these failures are traceable back to the project initiation and selection process. A number of projects start on the road to failure by not having a direct link to one or more specific business strategies and goals. Even when there is linkage, how you measure success is not always clear or practical. Too often the measurements are defined around outputs, such as schedule, resources, budgets, and artifacts like documentation and lines of code. The strategic goal and the people charged with accomplishing it are interested in the outcome. Simply stated, did the project result enable the company to meet or exceed the strategic goal?

Even those that do try to connect the project with the strategy and do define and track related information, they fall into the trap of focusing solely on the historic financial measurements, such as ROI (Return on Investment) and revenue. These are limited and faulty. First, these are backwards looking and the calculations occur long after the project finishes. Any lessons learned, corrections, or improvements are hard to collect, come too late to help the project succeed, and are too easy to ignore or dismiss in the rush to finish the next project.

While every company wants to make money, directly connecting the initial guest with any revenue is difficult for projects that are not strictly working on a customer deliverable. The projects that focus on improving how the company currently does business or transforming some aspect and creating something new are too removed for a direct and immediate connection with any revenue stream. A large number of companies can not even accurately track the number of hours each person worked on any specific project. To expect a “real time” accounting which enables management and the project manager to accurately track resource and costs, let alone connect those with any future revenue, is beyond almost all companies.

The answer to increasing project success is to select measurements that are forward looking and linked to the strategic goal. One example of a company that has done this well is Southwest Airlines. The airline does not make money if a plane is sitting on the ground. The strategic goal for this is to reduce the turn around time (interval between a plane landing and taking off on the next trip). Another strategic goal is customer satisfaction, since a happy customer is more likely to use them for their next trip. One type of project that supports both of these is improving and speeding up baggage handling. The forward focused metrics for this is turn around time and lost bags. Steps that shorten the time it takes to get the aircraft back into the air and does not increase the number of bags that are missing at the destination is successful. By measuring these during the project life cycle, you have the ability to adjust and correct. You will still have projects that fail, but measuring forward provides a method to detect and correct the failure before it becomes a catastrophe.



Technorati tags: project management; business strategy;

Choosing Empowerment Instead of Control

A recent bad experience prompted me to reread Peter Block’s “The Empowered Manager”. While the stated audience for the book is the middle manger and the manger at the top of an organization, the advice and insight is very valuable for Project Managers and the people that work on our projects.

The focus of the book is for us to move away from bureaucratic organizations that value control, dependency and use fear. We need to value autonomy, service and contribution to our customers and the company, and create energized employees. This movement is actually easier for Project Mangers than for some functional mangers.

Most Project Managers work in a matrix organization where they do not have the control and ability to create fear in the people on the project. By the nature of the job, ownership of tasks, responsibility for the work, and accomplishing the goals reside with each of the team members. Energizing the people on the team to step up and accept this is critical for success.

To do this, we have to communicate our expectations. As Stewart Levine advises in his book, “Getting to Resolution”, both sides need to document and discuss these expectations. For the Project Manager, this means working with all the key stakeholders, including people on the team, to make sure all of the expectations are explicit instead of hidden.


As a Project Management consultant, this is critical. Both you and the hiring manager need to document and agree on the deliverables. Overtime you update the agreement as things change. This is a simple word document and not a heavy legal contract. Pulling this out periodically helps to keep both of you coordinated and ensures that the goals stay aligned.

As I rediscovered, it is also a very critical first step when you are a direct employee. This becomes even more critical when your boss is thousands of miles and several time zones away. As a Project Manager that has lead several teams with globally disbursed members, I know the value of communication. Being on the other end of the relationship, I discovered that I was not able to drive, influence, or create a communications path. As the saying goes, the tail cannot wag the dog.



Technorati tags: project management; program management; management;

Remember, Quality is the Hidden Fourth Constraint

Every project manager has the three constraints drummed into them: time, budget, and resources. Experienced project managers understand that there is a forth part to the equation, quality. Everyone on the project has to know and agree on the minimum level of quality. The customer is the one that decides if the project is done, if they are satisfied with the results, and if the results are of usage. They will have some definition in their heads and unstated expectation of the quality of the deliverables which will change as the project progresses.

It is vital that the project manager work with the customer to get this definition stated in a clear and measurable way. That definition will impact the other three metric. The project manager and customer have to reach an agreement and an understanding on how this measurement relates to the other three. With this in hand, the project manager can make intelligent trade-offs and provide status reporting to the customer.
Everyone on the team also needs to understand the minimum level of quality and how that impacts their actions and deliverables. Any time that this is threaten, begins to impact the other three, or is impacted by the other three, this needs to be made visible to everyone. We are use to asking how each decision impacts time, costs, and resources. Everyone needs to also ask how the decision impacts quality.

Too many times the drivers on the project are to do it fast and cheap. That has resulted in large numbers of projects that fail or fail to satisfy the user. Budgets escalate and delivery dates stretch out as we get caught in the cycle of test, reject, and rework. The unfortunate fact for the project manager is that the same people that forced them down the road of fast and cheap will be the first to throw stones at them for missing deadlines, overrunning the budget and delivering something that is unusable.



Technorati tags: project management; program management;quality;

Aligning Strategic Business Goals with Project Goals

I have been busy with a new gig creating a Project Management structure using Intuit's Quickbase web service. The project request form is set up as a set of gates that require more work and more information as the project moves through the process. This has helped the company to have a common process for projects, to track projects as they move through the approval process, and to track approved and active projects.

The tool allows you to easily create and modify the form, apply rules to the fields, and control access. We have the ability to store things on the Intuit server or to link to documents in our SharePoint within the firewall. I also set it up to limit edit permission for some fields based on the person's role. Over the five months that we have been using it, it has proven flexible enough to allow changing the entire form layout, adding the off shore development team and their managers, and shifting the information as we change the process flow.

There were a number of things driving the company to set this up and use it. The major reason was the failure to get projects done on time. As is the case in most growing companies, resource assignment and usage was not visible to management. With a number of business development people getting new customers the delivery dates overlapped and created too many urgent projects. These were starting to displace the important projects, and the negative impacts on the Engineering resources were not visible.

Creating the structure and process flow was the easy part. Changing behavior so that the tool is used, people enter the right information in a timely manner, and management shifts from wanting to do everything to limiting the work to what can get done at the right level of quality is the current challenge. Currently we are working through the issues around ranking and comparing marketing (Return on Investment (ROI) focused) projects, with Engineering (process improvement and quality focused) projects, and maintenance (adding and improving data, and implementing fixes focused) projects. All of these are important. The key is balancing all of these as we move forward.



Technorati tags: project management; program management; Intuit Quickbase;

Processes, Projects, and Programs - OH My!

There can be confusion over the differences between an operational process, a project, and a program. In some cases this confusion is on purpose. As a Project Management consultant, I was brought in to help manage the work on one or more projects. As I dug into it, I found that some of the work was not really a project. Projects have a start, an end, deliverables, and are created to handle a specific business need. Projects can have multiple phases, projects can be used to improve and expand, and they can transition into a deployed using an operational process.

Handling multiple projects can lead to the work creeping upward into the area of Program Management. This is where the view shifts from getting the work on a project done to looking at the business strategy and how all the projects fit. The focus shifts into prioritization between projects, resource allocation on a larger scale, risk management that focuses on the impacts to the business, and the processes around starting, tracking, reporting, killing, and completing projects.

An operational process is an on-going set of tasks and most are focused on the day to day work supporting the organization. Work targeted at improving these fall into the continuous process improvement area. Because a project can be used to implement a significant change to one of these processes, there can be confusion. Some of that confusion contributes to the resistance to killing a project. It also is a factor in the reluctance to declare a project finished. This desire to call everything a project is especially strong if the business groups know that a process is not working well but do not know how to fix it. A transition from a project that is going well into a poorly run process is another reason that the business would want the project to continue.

The skill sets and expertise that makes you good at each of these is a little different. It is not difficult for the same person to be good at all three. The critical thing is to know when the work has shifted from one to another. On a recent consulting assignment, I set up the Program Management structure, creating forms, processes, and presentation formats. This provided a standardized method to request to start a project, track and report on-going projects, and prioritize the projects. On some of the projects, I was also the Project Manager, working to collect requirements, define and assign tasks, determine deliverables, etc.

I had set up and improved operational processes before, so I knew I had the expertise. But I was brought in as the Project Manager. I resisted attempts to get me to take over someone else’s area and fix the operational processes, too. I had continuous discussions explaining how a project and process are different. There were some attempts to disguise a broken process as a project. After some work and digging, I would unmask these impostors.

Setting up the program and project parts are important and a significant amount of work. The reality is that most, if not all, projects end up sitting on top of operational processes. The project initiation form collected the assumptions, constraints, and the fact that changing the processes were out of scope. The risk management documented these processes as risks items. None of that saved us. Projects became derailed, delayed, and negatively impacted because they were sitting on top of a bad process.

Next time, I will get into the mud and help shore up the process foundation. This will not be glamorous. It will also require skillfully navigating between two sharp and jagged rocks. One side is educating management that processes need repair. The other is avoiding having the people working on those processes see my work as a threat.



Technorati tags: project management; software;program management;

Software Project Management – shifting from a directed to a collaborative model

When software development started, they used the existing project management techniques. Those tools and techniques worked well for people constructing buildings, but they did not provide good tools for managing software projects. Using the standard water fall method, each step was completed, leading in a straight line to project completion. I know that this is a simple view. Some of the steps had overlaps so that the proceeding step could start before you finished the previous step. But, in general, the assumption was that all the requirements could be started at the beginning and that they changed slowly. People had thousands of years of experience interacting with and creating buildings. Not only is software a relatively new area, it is rapidly changing.

Dr. Barry Boehm published a new approach, the Spiral Software Development model, in 1988. This was a way to address the IKIWISI syndrome ("I can't tell you, but I'll know it when I see it”). In recent years, a number of new techniques have been created to address the problem of the customer not being able to give you all the requirements since they do not know all the requirements at the start of the project. Most of the techniques try to address this problem by developing what you know as fast as you can, so that you can present it to the customer. As the customer sees more of the software “functioning”, they can do a better job of clarifying the requirements. This happened in the earlier methods but was seen as “scope creep”. Due to this new information and requirements appearing late in the development, it was very costly to add the changes. That created an elaborate change management system which tried to reduce the number of changes.

The biggest change that has occurred from using the new methods is that the relationship between the project team and the customer has shifted. Instead of the project team being directed by the customer, we have shifted to a collaboration model where the project team and the customer work together. This is an important and critical change if we want to develop complex software projects that will be usable and support the business goals. The software project manager’s work shifted from coloring in triangles on a chart and driving work to fit to the plan, to that of a navigator.

As the project navigator, the job is to scan the horizon for changes, work with the customer to determine if the change impacts their goals, and then using that information to keep the project team on course. Continuous collaboration is now the key skill of the software project manager. The shift in the role of the customer means that they need to be more involved and need to work with the development team to surface decision points, eliminate undocumented programmer assumptions, and understand the trade-offs.

The current methodologies and techniques all work well in specific situations. Selecting the one best one will depend on the business culture and processes, the training and flexibility of the team members, and whether the requirements will change over the course of development. No matter which one you use, the software project manager has to keep the customer engaged and involved.



Technorati tags: project management; software;