Monday, 21 September 2009 00:00

How Many Things Can Go Wrong...

Rate this item

(0 votes)

It is common that when I am called into fix a red project to have management assign all of the projects ills to one problem. As of yet, I have to see such a project. There are multitudes of problems deeply embedded in the organization and the project team to make a project truly crimson. Managers look at how the problems manifest themselves, skip diagnoses and assign blame. Prior to getting to the point of calling an outside party, they have tried to fix the issues by attacking these symptoms. This only makes matters worse and the project becomes a deeper shade of red.

A red project never has one problem causing its ills. Following is a representative of many projects. This list of issues cited in one small project:

Scope creep
Maintenance included in the project
End user undefined
Project Sponsor undefined
Executive Management not monitoring the project
Product maintenance group missing
Authority not delegated to people that needed it
Trying to do too much with the skill set involved
No decision making

Three items were determined as root causes:

End user undefined
Lack of Executive involvement
Product maintenance group missing

Figure 1 - Symptoms Versus Root Cause

The key to bringing a project back from red is the ability to distinguish the symptoms from the disease. This is very difficult for someone on or associated with the project. The patient are too involved, too attached and too emotional. They need a physician to review the complaints and develop a prognosis and treatment.

It is easy to blame symptoms they are most visible. Scope creep is a common one. However, scope creep is always only a symptom. One or more root causes are the real problem. It may be that the customer fails to understand what they really need. It is possible that Project Manager is allowing change to take place sans management or they are restricting the essential changes. The team could be slipping in new scope to meet the wishes of the customer and avoiding the processes. It may be a combination of any of these. This happens with waterfall and Agile methodologies. Ignoring the process creates havoc. Trying to solve the problem, however, without finding its root cause, will result in more frustration and ultimately failure.

Figure 1 provides an example of an actual project and the list of symptoms that people were claiming to be the root problems. In analysis, they all stemmed from four issues. Initially, scope creep was the base reason. Shortly into the project audit, however, it was obvious that there were two groups claiming to be the end user, each having different requirements. Without defining the end user, the sponsor was unable to prioritize the features. Even with a well-defined scope, the inexperienced team was unable to provide the infrastructure and features in a monolithic delivery—it was simply too complex. Without proper decision making, the authority to phase the project was unavailable and no one could push to remove the maintenance tasks from the project. It all looked like scope creep that is out of control.

As opposed to management's attempts to blame the project team, the problems were primarily outside the project team. Fixing the three problems outside the project and phasing the delivery solved the problems with the project. The corrective actions were put in place and a junior Project Manager completed the project.

Read 10378 times

Tagged under

Related items

People vs Process Track Session/Keynote Example

<p>Sorry, your browser cannot display frames!</p>

If you want educational keynote many of our presentations can be keynotes or track sessions. In the example below, the presentation People or Process: Which Impacts Project Success More? is given as a track session.

Example People vs Process keynote as a track session

This session was given at the PMI Sioux Empire Professions Development Day help in Sioux Falls SD on September 9, 2014.
Transform Your Project Leadership: For Professionals Leading Projects or Company Initiatives
Todd Williams contributed Chapter 7, "Leaders Listen." You can buy it on Amazon.

More coming soon!
Filling Execution Gaps: How Executives and Project Managers Turn Corporate Strategy into Successful Projects

What Filling Execution Gaps Covers

Filling Execution Gaps

by Todd C. Williams
ISBN: 978-1-5015-0640-6
De G Press (DeGruyter), September 2017

Project alignment, executive sponsorship, change management, governance, leadership, and common understanding. These six business issues are topics of daily discussions between executives, middle management, and project managers; they are the pivotal problems plaguing transformational leadership. Any one of these six, when improperly addressed, will hex a project's chances for success. And, they do—daily—destroying the ability companies to turn vision into value.

Check it out on Amazon or the Filling Execution Gaps website

Without the foundation of a common understanding of goals and core concepts, such as value being critical to success, communication stops and projects fail.

Without change management, users fail to adopt project deliverables, value is lost, and projects fail.

Without maintaining alignment between corporate goals and projects, projects miss their value targets and projects fail.

Without an engaged executive sponsor, scope increases, goals drift, chaos reigns, value is lost, and projects fail.

Without enough governance, critical connections are not made, steps are ignored, value is overlooked, and projects fail.

Too much governance slows progress, companies cannot respond to business pressures, value drowns in bureaucracy, and projects fail.

Without strong leadership defining the vision and value, goals are not set, essential relationships do not form, teams do not develop, essential decisions are not made, and projects fail.
Filling Execution Gaps: Building Success-Focused Organizations

Executives define vision, strategy, and goals to advance the business. Projects enable companies to meet those goals. Between strategy and projects, there is a lot of work to be done—work that lays the foundation for project and operational success. Through experience and research, six common gaps exist in organizations that inhibit project success—an absence of common understanding, disengaged executive sponsors, misalignment with goals, poor change management, ineffective governance, and lackluster leadership.
Get Recognized as a Leader: Four Core Leadership Actions

Leaders make decisions. This requires a core set of actions to gather the best information, hear out the concerns of others, and making a decision that everyone will follow—even if there is not unanimous agreement with the decision. Although there are hundreds of actions leaders must take, there are four core actions that all great leaders do—listening, dialog and discussion, selling a vision, and eliminating blame. This session will discuss those actions in a roundtable format that we call a "What Would You Do?" session. In these sessions, the presenter acts as a moderator spending 10 to 15 minutes per topic working with the audience talking about what the action is, how to best do it, and hearing from the group on how they have carried out the action. This brings significant audience interaction, involvement, and broader education.