Weeks ago, few of us could have imagined the situation we find ourselves in today. As the COVID-19 situation continues to cause havoc to businesses around the world, managing rapid change and project delivery has never been more critical for business success. Business are evaluating projects and programs and their value to the business more closely than ever before like NAB did recently. At times like this it is also very critical to be able to deliver projects successfully as failure to do so can be the last nail in the coffin for your business. If you are a project manager or a program manager or a project sponsor or a business owner or a product owner or a stakeholder that might be depending on the success of a critical project, you must be wondering what can I or we as a team do differently? If so then you will find this article useful as it offers 7 crucial tips to ensure you taking your project in the right direction for successful completion.
A bit of background about me before you jump into the article. I have over 20 years experience in successfully delivering multi-million dollar Digital Transformation projects for global, national and startup companies. I am a certified Project Management Professional, Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and Agile Scrum master. I am an avid organic farmer, cartoonist (the picture on this article is my own drawing), technology enthusiast and passionate about leveraging technology, process and people to deliver the right outcomes to organisations. I am hopeful that you will find some portions of this article useful for yourself or your teams or for someone you know, so don’t hesitate to like and share this article. Lets jump to the main reason why you are still reading…
How do I deliver successful projects under such challenging circumstances?
Most Project and Program Managers would be very familiar and regularly using some sort of project management methodology like PMBoK which highlights stages and knowledge areas for project delivery. The five stages in PMBoK are quite simple to understand: A project goes through some sort of Initiation (aha moment as to why a project is needed), then Planning (how do we get this done, what resources do we need, by when do we need it to be done, how much money is needed, who are involved), then to Execution (lets all work together and get this done) to Monitoring & Control phase to ensure that focus on delivery as per plan to finally to Closing when the project is all done and we all sing “Kumbaya”, pat our backs and move on. The ten knowledge areas on the other hand are focus areas (some even call them skill areas) that are used throughout the project delivery. In my experience of not only leading projects but also being a sponsor and putting together a team to be led by qualified project managers, program managers, product owners, these knowledge areas are not necessarily at the same levels of importance. Referring to the diagram below, these knowledge areas can be broken down into 3 focus areas:
- Level 1: Basic focus area
- Level 2:Secondary focus area
- Level 3: Advanced focus area
I will explain why I am breaking these down into 3 levels. Most project leaders or managers tend to assume that the basic focus areas should be like hygiene factor. Hygiene factors refers to certain expectations that must be met for anything to be achieved, like getting salary for work done. Without the focus on management of Scope, Time Cost and Quality any project is certainly doomed for failure. Sponsors, project managers, team leads must always be focusing on these factors every day of the project execution.
The second level of focus areas are on risk and integration and many projects do manage to get delivered without much focus on these areas or navigate around these areas by leveraging additional budget and resourcing. However at times like these when everything is constrained, these areas cannot be ignored. Projects must and should focus on all the risks involved and document clear steps on how to handle them when they happen. A project doesn’t always work in isolation so all touch points and integrations come under the scope of the project as well. I will touch upon certain aspects of risk in the tips section of this article (it is coming I promise)!
The third level of focus area consists mainly of the so called “Touchy-Feely” areas that many tend to either avoid or just undermine their importance. These include people touch points and management of Human resources (your team mates, your pals, your buddies, your colleagues, cogs in the machinery that are so very important to get things done), Procurement (partners, contractors, suppliers, vendors), Stakeholders (who are these people you say) and the most important of all Communication! I know what you are thinking, “But we have a great team, non interfering stakeholders and we always have one hour daily stand up! What more is needed?” Even though you might be following all processes and ceremonies of your project delivery methodology there are however some key points you should be aware of in the 3rd level of focus area.
So finally we get to list those 5 Crucial Tips are that you can leverage to enhance the success of any project. Without further adieu here they are (drum rolls):
“1. Know your stakeholder’s Bias
2. Say what you will do and do as you say
3. Manage budget to a Range
4. Don’t disturb the team rhythm
5-Share, Listen, Adapt”
1. Know your stakeholder’s Bias – Stakeholders are those who are impacted by the successful delivery of a project. Stakeholders can hold a positive, neutral or a negative bias (prejudice or inclination) towards a project either because they will benefit from it, don’t really care either way or they will face unwanted consequences (e.g. job loss, power loss, business loss, safety loss, additional work etc). Not only is it important to identify stakeholders for the project, it is even more important to know their under lying bias. To successfully deliver a project these bias must be dealt appropriately. A positive bias must be enhanced & shared while a neutral bias must be protected to never become negative and if possible made positive. A project must be protected from negative bias by making it neutral or getting adequate protection from the project sponsor. It is very likely that some stakeholders will hide their bias so it would be prudent to do some digging around in the initial stages of the project.
2. Say what you will do and do as you say – Although this seems like a very easy thing to do, it is not always so. I have seen many projects fail due to the inability of those involved to not buckle under pressure when unreasonable demands are made. Usually such demands can be made when being hired or during project kick off or even during later project reviews. I am sure you have heard of statements such as “Deliver this project by next month or can you make sure that we don’t make any changes to scope or that no matter what happens we don’t want the quality of this project affected”. These statements seem reasonable at first sight but these must be taken in a “quid pro quo” approach. For example, the project will stay as per the timeline even if there is a scope creep as long as sufficient budget is made available to hire extra help. Any sweeping generalised statements made about project must be taken with a pinch of salt. There is no point accepting situations that are unreasonable to save your job because when the unreasonable expectation cannot be met, there will be job loss and also reputation loss. However, once there is commitment to get something done then you have to be resourceful enough to get it done. This is the only way to build your credibility with your team and stakeholders.
3. Manage budget to a Range – One of the most classical questions faced by a project manager is “Why did the project exceed the approved budget?”. The main reason this question is asked is due to the fact that most people when approving a project budget think about it as a number that will never be exceeded. In reality, projects can never ever be managed to a budget but rather to a budget range. Let me clarify this further. When the annual financial planning process begins in a company, many factors are unknown but companies do have to allocate funds based on desired business outcomes. The challenge for the budget planners is to neither under allocate (leading to project failure) nor over allocate (leading to other projects not getting access to funds) budget to a project. During initial planning phase (also called idea level), the cost of a project can be guestimated as $X +/- 50% and as the project details are sorted out, this can be further narrowed down to $X +/-15% and then to finally to somewhere close +/-5% depending on the clarity on risk management. The reality is that a project will usually either fall under or over budget and very rarely exactly on budget. Bringing in a culture of estimating, tracking, reporting to budget ranges rather than to a fixed budget is a far better mechanism to achieve project success.
4. Don’t disturb the team rhythm – Whether you are using waterfall model or agile model, any project team goes through its 5 stages of evolution: Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing and Adjourning.
When Forming a new team, tremendous amount of management activities will be required to bring teams and people together. During Storming stage, management will have to keep a close watch on conflicts, team issues and HR policy violations. However, once the team starts to hit the stride in Norming stage and starts to evolve to Performing stage, management needs to take their feet of the gas peddle and let the team cruise in the rhythm that has evolved. As one of the famous quotes of project management goes “Success has many fathers, failure is an orphan“, when the project team is running well, everyone wants to be part of it, everyone has ideas on how it should be run differently, everyone wants their brand associated with it and while they all mean well, this very act of trying to constantly tweak the team breaks the team as well. Management’s key responsibility is in adopting a Hands-off approach to not break this rhythm until the team can be Adjourned.
5. Share, Listen, Adapt – This is probably a very generic advice not specific to any stage of the project. Everyone has good ideas and these good ideas deserve an audience who can listen in, understand, critique and accept/adapt/reject them. Not creating a safe culture and platform for this purpose, can become a major hindrance to the success of a project. It is quite likely that important updates, emerging risks, issue resolution ideas can be lost forever leading to a delayed or unsuccessful project. Certain leaders make statements such as “Fail fast” but when failures do happen, instead of learning from it and moving on, they waste critical time in witch hunts and blame games. Such scenarios can be clearly avoided if the team’s voices, ideas, concerns are regularly heard, absorbed, critiqued and suitable responses identified. This approach creates far more ownership and allegiance to the project success more than anything else.
So, this short article highlighted the top 5 tips that in my experience are key for any project’s success. While projects may adopt any delivery model, may leverage any technology, develop plethora of unique solutions to deliver outcomes for the project, these tips remain quite universal in their applicability. Hope you found the article to be useful in perhaps revising something you already knew or in creating some new ideas to improve the success of your projects. Drop me a message in LinkedIn if you would like to have a chat about this topic or if you are looking to discuss about a project you are involved in! I promise that the only thing it will cost you is a coffee meeting with me when the lock down is lifted! 😉
Stay Safe and Stay Cheerful!