"You're Beautiful"
In the summer of 2005, the song you heard most when you turned on the radio was “You’re Beautiful” by James Blunt. It reached Number 1 in the UK and USA and many other countries and won an Ivor Novello award. Blunt had more hits and his star burned bright for a while. Then something strange happened. Almost imperceptibly, he became a laughingstock – lampooned memorably on ‘Gavin & Stacy’. Blunt took this well and now revels in this through his own self-parody Twitter account (@JamesBlunt). Why do I start here? Well I wonder if even James knows when it all flipped for him and he went from star to self-parody?
I have spent the best part of my career delivering projects and programmes. Some of these have been initiatives that have been well conceived, well executed and well received by their respective business – some have failed on at least one of those factors. The reasons why projects fail are well understood and well documented. Briefly, they can be summarised as unclear vision, poor estimating (cost and time), poor stakeholder engagement, scope creep, insufficient management of risk and a whole raft of cultural and leadership failings.
Other people have written extensively on why projects fail. But not many people have written specifically about how to recover a failed project. The obvious answer is to put “Don’t do” in front of all of the failure reasons above – but if you are the person being parachuted into a failing project to turn it around, that’s not going to be much help.
My aim is to write a blog series that can act as a Survival Guide to those intrepid souls who run to towards failing projects when everyone else is bailing out. I have managed a few project/programme recoveries in my career. Some of these have been successful and some have not. I am confident that the tips I have compiled will help others in these stressful situations make a quick impact.
This blog is written as guidance to the individual who has been offered the role (often termed the “opportunity”) to take over a failing project as the Project or Programme Manager. I will make no distinction in these articles between projects and programmes – large projects and small programmes fail, and the same survival tips apply for both. For brevity I will refer to this role as the PM and I will use the term Project to cover Projects and Programmes.
My first piece of advice is to be acutely aware that at some point you will transition from the saviour to being perceived as part of the problem. Delaying this transition and being perceived as the saviour for as long as possible is obviously in your interests. If you can delay this point until after the project is seen as being a success, then you will have pulled it off.
Even being aware that the transition is happening is hugely important. Related to this is ensuring you are alert to whether you have the support of your seniors to make the changes you want to make. Any failure on their part to support you will undoubtedly lead to you making that transition sooner than you would like.
To make this situation more challenging, you need to actively take on the project leadership role immediately – you don’t have the luxury of acting as an outside consultant - reviewing what is going wrong. The quicker you can communicate in terms of “what we need to do” the better for everyone. How you do this without implicitly being held responsible for all the failings of the project before you arrived takes skill – especially as it gets boring really quickly for everyone if you keep reminding everyone that all the bad stuff happened before you arrived.
Ultimately, this is a challenge of leadership and communication. People will respect you if you take ownership of the programme – and let’s face it, it will be difficult to get all the changes you want made if people don’t see you as being the person in charge. You need to find ways to make it clear through use of language that you are taking responsibility for the project now, but not responsible for what went before.
One approach to addressing this situation is to insist on a distinct Entry process with your sponsor(s). You can agree the duration of Entry, but would typically be 2 to 4 weeks. During this Entry stage there are a number of outcomes you should drive towards. First of all, discuss with the sponsor(s) their understanding of the reasons for the project failure. Secondly, agree what the desired outcome is. This sounds obvious but it is critical to understand what is most important – timescales, scope, budget? It is likely to be all three, but you should tpush further for a better understanding of what the real priorities are and why, to give the project (and you) a chance of being successful. Finally, agree a “contract” with sponsor. This is not a legal/commercial contract, but an agreement that sets out what each party expects of each other and themselves and how you will manage this contract. This is similiar to a Coaching Contract and there are a number of good internet resources to help you create a Coaching Contract. If the sponsors don’t take this Entry process seriously, I advise you to seriously consider walking (or running) away. Otherwise, no matter how much you believe in yourself, you will be like the new manager of the football team in the relegation zone who moves their team up a few places in the league, only to drop back down again when you realise the lack of investment in new players is strangling your ambition. And who really wants to be David Moyes!
Over this blog series I will take you through the various stages of project recovery, from due diligence, through the honeymoon period to some form of conclusion. Project recovery is not for the faint-hearted, but I hope that some of these tips will delay your James Blunt moment as long as possible.
Mobilisation Tip: I would strongly advise following the same Entry process for a new project, as for a failing one. Agreeing that contract up front with your sponsors will save a lot of stress later in the project, as every project has major challenges. It can also be helpful to think forward when starting a new project and imagine how this new project may get into trouble and how do you use your mobilisation period to guard against it. The pervading optimism in a new project can blind everyone to those catastrophic scenarios. Set some time aside with your team as part of your initial project planning. Imagine the worst-case scenarios and how do you as a team guard against them. Done properly this can be a mechanism to bind the team tighter together to ensure you don’t fall into those traps that you have all seen other projects fall into.
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