"All Along The Watchtower"
So if you are following along from previous posts in the series, you will have gathered information on the Business Case, how things are being reported currently, you will have had multiple conversations with multiple people involved in the project and you will have reviewed the financial history of the project. You will be starting to get a feel for the project and why it needs to be turned around.
You now need to form some conclusions on what you have read and heard to help you start to create a plan for your first weeks on the project (which will be the focus of the next blog post).
In popular music there are many cover versions which are better than the original, and many of the songs in that category were written by Bod Dylan. You may not even know that the following were written by Dylan: Along the Watchtower (Jimi Hendrix), Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn) (Manfred Mann), Make You Feel My Love (Adele), Mr Tambourine Man (The Byrds), Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door (Guns ’n’ Roses). That is not to say that these are not great songs – they were just not as well performed by Dylan as they were by people coming after.
So, let’s look for some of the typical ‘bum-notes’ in original performances.
The Obvious Ones
First of all, the obvious ones. These are issues which are common on many projects and are easy to spot and relatively easy to put right.
1. Steering Groups not Steering
In failing projects, these either don’t happen or are attended by the wrong people. This needs to be faced into immediately. Don’t imagine you can successfully deliver a project in the absence of your sponsors. Even if you do get it over the line, the change won’t stick without their support.
2. Risks and Issues too risky
Too often, the meetings to review risks and issues spend their time debating/changing what information to record, what the categories are, what the escalation routes, how to score – and don’t actually discuss the risks and issues and what they should do about them. Focus the meeting is discussing issue/risk mitigation. Continuous improvement can happen outside the meeting.
3. Heads in the sand
We have all been in the situation where there is an issue so big that no-one wants to tackle it – but it is not going away. As a wise man once told me “bad news is not like wine – it does not improve with age”.
4. Reports not reporting
Similar to the Risk point above, if you see reports highlighting things like “attended meeting” or “wrote document”, either there is too much reporting and people are completing reports when they should be left to do work, or not enough real progress is being made – or both.
5. Too many governance meetings, not enough governance!
Organisations love meetings, and project organisations even more so. As a PM you can easily find yourself in meetings all day every day looking at budgets, plans, issues, changes, reports. Some projects fall into the trap of thinking that this means they are well governed – but quite often it is the opposite.
6. Communications have lapsed
An obvious sign of a failing project is the lack of any project communications. When the project is failing the leadership think a) I am too busy fixing this to tell anyone what is going on and b) we can’t communicate to people without lying to them about our problems, so let’s just stay quiet.
The Gnarly Ones
Secondly, the more gnarly ones. The ones that people might be aware of but either don’t want to admit to, or they are sitting in the “too difficult” bucket.
You might be getting a feeling about these issues from you due diligence but they will not be fixed quickly. Also, you should appreciate that at this point, before you have joined the project, that these are hunches or suspicions. You need to spend more time “sense-making” with the teams and stakeholders to identify if they are real issues and if so, how to fix them. So, for now, I will just list some of them from experience, and come back to them in future blog posts in the series.
1. Are supplier contract incentives aligned to programme strategy?
Often supplier contracts agreed before the programme is mobilised incentivise suppliers in ways that are not aligned to the objectives of the contract (e.g. fixed price for fixed scope and agile delivery). Unless addressed, these will create inertia and disfunction in the project.
2. Are customer and supplier responsibilities understood and adhered to?
Are the Customer and all of the Suppliers clear on what their roles and responsibilities are? Without a clear responsibility matrix (or RACI) tension, confusion and inefficiency will persist. This is particularly challenging when there are multiple suppliers with different scope and roles.
3. Is Culture & Behaviour given enough airtime?
Is there an underlying level of trust and collaboration amongst all of the parties within the project? Is this tracked on a regular basis? Does the leadership of the project spend time discussing behaviour and culture and do they role-model the desired behaviours?
4. Are the business & technology transformations managed together?
Digital, or any form of technical transformation is as much about business and organisational transformation as it is about technology. Managing the transformations differently, with different teams and different governance and approaches is seldom a recipe for success. There are many delivery approaches that will guide you on how to do this, but it starts with a mindset that the technology and business need to be transformed in-step.
5. Is there a “cult of the individual”
Leadership is critical on projects. However, there persists in many organisations a culture that the leader needs to be the Alpha or the smartest person in the room. The cult of the individual may get results in a very short period of time (and even that is questionable) if that is what is needed, but will backfire in the longer term. As the new project leader, have some humility, ask questions, listen, make decisions in a consultative way. It isn’t a democracy, but your role is get the best outcome from the project team – not to massage your ego.
In music, it is always easier to do a cover version than it is write a truly original song. And so it is in project delivery. Have some empathy with the ones who have come before on the project. Maybe they were great songwriters – just not such great performers.
Mobilisation Tip
To wring every ounce of value from the song-writing analogy – attend a songwriting class once in a while. It is great practice for a seasoned project turnaround expert to keep their hand in at creating projects on a regular basis to keep you in tune with what makes an outstanding project and how difficult they can be to create.
(c) Copyright Coagility Ltd. 2020
Street scene photo by Ian on Unsplash
Watchtower photo by Krystian Ślusarz on Unsplash