"Reasons to be Cheerful (Part 3)"
Typically, you will have some time between being asked to take on the Turnaround PM role and your first day in the role. You need to make the most of this time in carrying out your due diligence! As this is an important process, I have split the topic across two blog posts. The first one focusses on information gathering. The second one will focus on "sense-making" and how to begin managing expectations.
In 1979, the great Ian Dury had a hit with “Reasons to be Cheerful, Part 3”. (Don’t ask me what happened to parts 1 and 2.) The song is essentially a list of things to be cheerful about. It includes such things as Smoky Robinson, Cheddar cheese and pickle sandwiches, ‘being in the nuddy’, carrot juice and claret. A list I can’t disagree with! In just under 5 minutes, Dury manages to mention 30 reasons to be cheerful, plus sings a few choruses and there is a blistering saxophone solo. It might feel during your due diligence process that you are compiling an equally long list in a short amount of time – but you need to stick to the task as you won’t get this time back.
The due diligence process I recommend goes as follows.
- Business Case
- Reporting
- Conversations (in sequence)
- Follow the Money
This isn’t a linear process, you will need to iterate through the above a number of times depending on the size and complexity of the project. But I recommend you iterate using this sequence, for reasons I will explain.
Business Case
The tendency is to focus immediately on what has gone wrong. However, I prefer to take a little bit of time at this early stage to go back to the beginning and understand the vision and purpose of the project. To do this go back to source materials including the Business Case, financial models, vision statements and early project communications.
There are two reasons to do this at the start. Firstly, this is the time when you will have as few preconceptions about the project as possible and can review with objectivity. Secondly, often projects fail because the team have lost sight of the business case. If you rely on the team explaining the business case, you risk falling into the same trap.
Having assimilated the Business Case you can now approach the next steps, armed with the core information on why the project exists and what it is trying to achieve.
Reporting
Next, I recommend you trawl through all levels of project reporting. Again, I recommend you do this before you have had any significant conversations with stakeholders to avoid being influenced by their perspective.
Work through reports in reverse chronological order. You are trying to get your head around two things. Firstly, what does the reporting say about what is going wrong. Are the themes consistent across different types of report (project, financial, stakeholder)? Has the narrative evolved in an understandable way, or do the reports suggest deeper issues that aren’t being addressed? Secondly, what can you infer from the quality of the reporting? Project reporting is an art. The quality and consistency of the reporting is a good indicator of the quality of the governance and discipline on the project.
Armed with the Business Case and an objective view of the problems on the project and how they are being reported, now is the time to start asking the many questions you will undoubtedly have.
Conversations (in sequence)
Again, there is logic to why I am suggesting you (at least) start your conversations in this order. Everyone involved in a project has a vested interest. And the more senior a person’s role on a project the more influence they have on whether the project is a success or a failure. By starting with external conversations, you can ask broad, open-ended questions and are more likely to get an objective assessment - try starting with people who are no longer on the project but have a viewpoint. Then work through people on the project to get their input and finally the stakeholders and sponsors of the project. As you go through this process you will be gathering insights, anecdotes and evidence of what has gone wrong.
When you get to the sponsors you will have a lot of information and a lot of questions to ask. Please, don’t waste this opportunity. In most failing projects that I have been involved in, the sponsor is at least partly responsible for the project failing. If they haven’t realised this yet, you need to start educating them. And this is the time to start.
Follow the Money
Projects live or die on their budgets. Every decision is informed by cost. In longer projects spanning multiple financial years, decisions will have been made about budgets and forecasts which will have had an impact on the project. Therefore, you need to spend a good amount of time pouring over the budget, and its history to really understand what is going on within the project.
In the opening refrain of his hit Ian Drury repeatedly sings “why don’t you get back into bed”. Hopefully this isn’t how you are feeling at this point and you’ll stick around for the next part.
Mobilisation Tip: When mobilising a new project, rather than recovering a failing one, it is important to ensure the vision is articulated clearly enough to ensure that no-one ever loses sight of it. Build it into all of your project communications so that no-one can ever claim to not know what it is. Your reporting format can also be connected to the vision to ensure that you are tracking how you are “delivering the vision” and not just reporting “work done”. Finally, create a mechanism to formally capture feedback regularly from your stakeholders to ensure that you are not slowly drifting out of alignment with them.
(c) Copyright Coagility Ltd. 2020