GUEST BLOG: CoachingOurselves past the failures in Project Management.

Alex Keenan is a very interesting and insightful senior specialist from Kroger who recently contacted us at CoachingOurselves. He pointed out a discussion thread at LinkedIn in one of the Project Management Groups. One PM asked the group for their top causes of project failure. This created a thread with over a 1000 responses.

Alex realized that many CoachingOurselves Topics could be used to stimulate and provoke productive discussions around many of the top causes of project failure, and so could be used by a project manager to drive a useful 90 minute discussion around a specific current issue as he/she works to make their project a success. Below is his very well written analysis and discussion of the top causes of project failure based on over 1000 responses from Project Managers around the world, and description of how a tactical use of one or two CoachingOurselves topics could help ensure success.

I have been following an interesting discussion for a number of months now. This discussion can be found on www.pmlink.org for group members on LinkedIn and is titled “In your experience, what is the TOP #1 cause for Project failure?” As of April 8th there are 1,066 comments on this discussion. It is interesting because of the large number of comments and the diverse geographic distribution of the people leaving comments. The comments lead one to the conclusion that the primary reasons for project failure are shared across the world. The top six key words used in this discussion are:

• Management: used 523 times.
• Communication: used 346 times.
• Plan: used 284 times.
• Requirements: used 279 times.
• Risk: used 205 times.
• Creep (as in scope creep): used 197 times.

These words point to failure of the project from the start of the project. The comments show time and time again that the failure started early and if not identified and corrected by the project manager, became harder and harder to correct until a point was reached where failure was the only option. Many projects are put into jeopardy due to actions of the executive management level at the beginning of the project. Some of the main failures were:

• Issues with executive project sponsorship.
• Issues with effective communication and the ability to collaborate.
• Lack of clarity on requirements to achieve organizational goals.
• Politics and organizational culture involving executives and/or stakeholders.

A project by definition is a unique, temporary effort an organization undertakes that often results in the creation of a new asset or the creation/modification of one or more business processes within the organization. One can look at projects as innovations generally falling into two categories:

1. Sustaining innovation (incremental innovation), aims at protecting or enlarging your market share by taking what you are currently doing and increasing value for customers and/or making things simpler for employees. It has minor impact on the business model.
2. Disruptive innovation generally involves product, service, and technology breakthroughs, business model innovations, and new ventures. It can create major impact to the business model or create a new business model altogether.

Since most ideas that lead to change are incremental, it is not uncommon for many projects that an organization undertakes to be sustaining or incremental in nature. So what happens when the change is something outside the norm? A disruptive innovation carries a higher risk. It is also likely that the project will have a greater impact on the organization undertaking the project. Common factors associated with disruptive innovation projects are:

• Complexity resulting from interrelationships and dependencies between functional areas inside and outside the organization. There is a direct relationship between complexity and overall project risk.
• Limited time frames due to factors outside the control of the organization, such as windows of opportunity, legal requirements, changing technology, etc. The more limited the time, the higher the risk to the project.
• Rate, degree, and impact of change on the structure and stability of business processes. A system can handle only so much change at any given time.
• Degree of learning that must take place. Some projects require proof of concept, bench test, and full production rollout because the organization is going where it has never gone before. It is not uncommon with disruptive innovation to have to learn as you act. Learning has to be accounted for and failing fast allowed.
• Overall size of change and scalability of results throughout the organization. A solution that works for a group of 10 may not be practical for a group of 100. However, it is not uncommon for solutions to be extended beyond their limits instead of new solutions being found.
• Organizational politics and structure, some projects need a corporate culture that says everyone can contribute to this process; everyone has insights. People unconsciously weight their reasoning in favor of desirable outcomes. Tanya Menon from the University of Chicago said, ["In a business era that celebrates anything creative, novel, or that demonstrates leadership, "borrowing" or "copying" knowledge from internal colleagues is often not a career-enhancing strategy. Employees may rightly fear that acknowledging the superiority of an internal rival's ideas would display deference and undermine their own status"].

So what can the organization do to increase the odds of project success at the start? An organization can hire Business Analysts, Project Managers, etc. But as the Blog showed, the management of the organization can itself increase the odds of a successful project from the start. So does the project sponsor take a class, buy a book, and view webinars on project management? Such action may improve the knowledge of the sponsor; unfortunately projects do not happen in a vacuum, in disruptive innovation projects more so than sustaining innovation projects. So can group learning take place to improve project success? There are several systems that will teach a group of people. However, most of these systems are pushing information over a short period of time. A system of change that allows participants to learn through reflection and discussion based on their own organization over a period of weeks or months allows group learning to take place tailored to specific situations. Such learning can be targeted to the underlining problem or opportunity that a project will be created to address. I have found that Coaching Ourselves offers such a system (www.CoachingOurselves.com). Below are a few of their offerings that I have mapped to lowering project failure.

• Appreciating in Appreciative Inquiry; understanding what is already working within an organization and why it works can be an important baseline before change takes place. Such an understanding can lead to better project requirements.
• Developing Our Organization as a Community; every project creates a community. How effective this community is will directly impact communication and collaboration throughout the life of the project.
• Innovate Using Generative Relationships; generative relationships are ones that bring unforeseen, novel solutions to a complex context. Disruptive innovation often has no precedent. Understanding Generative Relationships can be a key to mapping alternative actions to deal with challenges.
• Political Games in Organizations; an organization can deal with politics up front or an organization can deal with results of politics as the project develops.
• Some Surprising Things about Collaboration; projects do not generally happen in a vacuum. Things like defining requirements, dealing with issues, etc. all require collaboration.
• Two Models of Change; many projects are about change. Understanding changes in the context of one’s organization can lead to a smoother acceptance of change.
• Understanding Stakeholders, poor management of stakeholders during the project is an important cause of project failure.
• Visionary Management – The Art of Seeing First; a clear vision is the key to creating clear project requirements, which in turn determine the scope of the project.

So read the large number of comments on the Blog and then look at some of the offerings of CoachingOurselves. Think about what areas could be enhanced as part of the beginning stage of your next disruptive project. If you have a PMO or Project Management group, take a look at your lessons learned and see if the comments from the Blog are showing up in your lessons learned. You may be surprised at what you find.

Alexander J. Keenan PMP
Kroger Company, Legacy Billing Systems
Cincinnati, Ohio
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/alexander-keenan/2/401/52b