My first questions are: "What happened that made you decide to implement this program at this time? What event precipitated project initiation?" I can’t tell you how many times I've heard silence. Or, even worse, a further explanation of the project (we’re implementing SAP in three phases), without any reference to business imperatives (we need to reduce our time to market). Ten million dollars have been spent, yet the project team does not have a clear understanding of the compelling business reasons why the entire initiative was launched in the first place. They were doomed to failure before they even began.
Even if a major project manages to crawl, gasping over the last milestone, if business objectives were never clearly understood and communicated, how can it be judged a success? Pity the poor project manager who’s spent a harrowing 18 months only to be told, “too bad the new program hasn’t had a positive impact on employee productivity”, when he had no idea productivity was important, merely meeting deadlines.
While the project with no clear business objectives is problematic, even more disturbing is the project with too many business objectives. Runaway projects start small, then grow incrementally until they collapse under their own weight I’ve seen projects canceled after 10 million, 20 million, 30 million, yes, even 40 million has been spent.
Setting clear objectives and sticking to them is part of Management 101. So why is it ignored with large projects, usually headed by high level managers? I've heard a lot of excuses including:
- We have to do it anyway (government regulations, dictates from above, etc.)
- We can’t waste time with excessive planning, the situation is too urgent.
- Someone must know, and we’re not going to appear stupid or insubordinate by asking.
- We’ve already decided what we’re going to do, more discussion might derail things, give people time to come up with questions and objections we can’t answer.
- This is the way we do things around here.
- I’ve always wanted to implement _____________. We’ve got to strike while the iron is hot.
- What do you mean? Everyone already understands the objectives.
What's your excuse?
1 comment:
I agree...so many projects are intitiated without a compelling business case.
And once initiated, project Managers usually “fly by the seat of their pants”. They roll up their sleeves and get stuck into execution as early as possible. The stress of tight time delays, insufficient resources and lack of funds means that initiation and planning go out the window and they get straight into building deliverables.
There are hundreds of reasons for adopting a formal project management methodology.....understanding the objectives of the project from the very beginning is just one of them.
Post a Comment