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Five Critical Factors for Program and Project
Success
There are important analogies between project
development and child development. Care during gestation and infancy
can minimize the risk of defects, health problems, and developmental
delays.
Programs and projects that start out weakly have
a grim prognosis. Earned Value Management (EVM) experts often say that
a project will seldom recover if costs and schedules are not under
control by the time work is 20% complete. Those that begin with
negative performance indicators generally end up with cost overruns and
completion delays.
Developing strong and healthy projects can avoid
or minimize many of the performance problems that typically grow more
serious—or even disastrous—later in the project lifecycle.
Based on many years of experience as a
management consultant and project manager, I have selected five
critical factors that can help your organization develop and nurture
better programs and projects. Careful attention to these factors will
lead to better outcomes and reduce project risk:
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Focus on the Right Problem
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Keep Your Eyes and Ears Open
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Define and Manage Your Requirements
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Create the Right Team
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Foster a Common Understanding
Focus on the Right Problem
Identifying the right problem is not always
obvious or straightforward. Indeed, focusing on end-user needs and
complaints alone will often lead to band-aid remedies or presumed
solutions that are ineffective.
Here is a historic example of chasing the wrong
problem: For centuries, the disease malaria was blamed upon bad air
associated with swampy environments, and the word malaria
comes from the Medieval Italian and means “bad air.” It was not until
1880 that a French army doctor, Laveran, observed parasites inside the
red blood cells of people suffering with the disease.
Avoid jumping on a “problem bandwagon” too soon
even if most people think the problem is obvious and well known.
Vendors may attempt to define the problem to the advantage of their
solution. Some ambitious colleagues in your organization may identify a
problem that supports their agenda. And some end-users would like a
band-aid, even if it doesn’t lead to a strategic solution for the
organization.
For contractors, a major risk is to accept the
customer’s definition of the problem without detailed investigation and
validation. One of the purposes of newer procurement vehicles, like
Statements of Objectives (rather than rigid Statements of Work), is to
give contractors more flexibility in defining a workable solution.
Our recommended approach for focusing on the
right problem is to begin with an enterprise-wide business analysis
that provides the framework for defining strategy and the potential
scope of the initiative. The basic steps for problem identification are:
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Organizational Goals and Mission
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Business Needs Assessment and Performance Review
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Gap Analysis
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Strategy
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Scope of Program and Project(s)
Only then should you focus in detail on user
needs and requirements elicitation—within the context of organizational
needs and strategy.
Keep Your Eyes and Ears Open
You can avoid a basketful of potential problems
by looking closely at the facts and listening to other people who have
“been there, done that.” This critical factor is crucial when devising
a solution that a program or project will undertake: Management
consultants often use the case study method because organizations need
more information about the Lessons Learned in other organizations that
have attempted similar or alternative solutions.
When we plan a new initiative for a client, we
search broadly for solutions that address similar problems. As closely
as practical, we seek to match up industry, organizational size, and
business environment. Between news, journals, vendor white papers,
scholarly articles, and industry associations, there is usually a
wealth of information.
Sometimes we develop original case studies,
seeking high-level summaries of requirements, solutions, timeframe,
scope, cost, benefits, problems, and outcomes. We like to know what
went wrong and what the organization would do differently if they
could. In government, there is often detailed information because of
public budget justifications, Requests for Proposals, histories of
contract modifications and costs, and identifiable vendors.
But eyes and ears also need to focus internally
within your organization. As Project Management Institute encourages,
it is important to maintain an organizational history of major
projects. If you do not know the common themes of project histories
within the organization, you are doomed to repeat the mistakes—many of
which could often be avoided through improved policies and business
processes.
Identifying your stakeholders and paying
attention to what they are saying is also an overlooked ingredient for
success. As Ernest Hemingway once said, “When people talk, listen
completely. Most people never listen.”
Define and Manage Your Requirements
Invest the time and money to develop detailed
plans, requirements, and documentation before you develop and implement
your solution. Impulses to reduce or eliminate the upfront work almost
always lead to cost overruns, delays, and disappointing outcomes.
Correcting defects—including errors and omissions—is far more
expensive than robust requirements planning.
Let’s use software development as an example of
the impact of faulty requirements management through the definition,
design, coding testing, and operational phases. It can cost up to 110
times more to correct a requirements defect found after the project is
implemented into operational phase than it would have cost during the
initial planning and definition phase. (Effective
Requirements Definition and Management. Borland Systems
Corporation, 2006.
http://www.borland.com/resources/en/pdf/solutions/rdm_whitepaper.pdf.)
We have found that requirements are multidimensional. You must deal
with both “product” specifications (i.e., characteristics of the
deliverables or output that the project will create) and with “project”
requirements. The former deals with product standards, characteristics,
and test results. The latter deals with time, scheduling, staff
resource, cost, change management, and supply-chain issues.
Requirements management is a continuous process.
After upfront planning, there are critical issues of change control.
Modifying one requirement may have a domino effect on various
dependencies within the project or the deliverable products. Software
is available to track the relationships between requirements, and this
is an invaluable tool for determining the cost and schedule
consequences of making changes that, on the surface, appear innocent
and small.
Processes for defining requirements and
managing their change over time provide an important means to managing
costs, schedule, risk, and product quality.
The Right Team
You can have the best plan and strategy in the world, but it will fall
apart without the right team. Major projects require an effective team
to be successful—not just a good project manager or technical officer.
“When I receive a business plan, I always read
the résumé section first,” writes William Sahlman in his article How
to Write a Great Business Plan. “Not because the people part of
the new venture is the most important, but because without the right
team, none of the other parts really matters.” (William A. Sahlman,
Harvard Business Review, July-August, 1997.)
The “right team” consists of several parts: the
core project staff, the experts who serve as resources, the suppliers,
and the Integrated Project Team (organization-wide stakeholders
including business, technical, line management, users, and project
owner). The team has the skills, experience, communication skills, and
commitment to make the program or project work. What’s more, the team
members are committed to the group, the collective vision, and the
overall success.
The importance of the team is obvious, but
programs and projects nonetheless get into trouble because the team is
incomplete, some members are inadequate, leadership is inept, or the
group dynamics are out of sync. If a project has a high priority,
leadership must commit to making the right people and resources
available.
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