Project or Programme Failing?
We probably have two choices. Despair or fight to fix the problems.
We probably have two choices when dealing with a failing project or programme:
Despair about it, close it and move on to another project
Or fight to fix the problems and recover the situation.
If we are losing a battle, and a project or programme can feel like a battle at times, those are the choices open to us.
Despair is the most common response apparently, when we are being defeated, we tend to drift into despair and whilst we might, initially, want to paint a brighter picture, we know the project or programme is in trouble.
Progress reports either don’t arrive at all, or contain the bare minimum information, hiding the truth behind the fact that the project teams have drifted on to some other project or back to their day jobs. The reports might even be optimistic, but only to hide the fact that nothing is really happening, things are not progressing.
Another sure fire sign that a project is starting to enter the failure road, is no issues or risks are being raised. This might sound positive, we could assume things are going well, but no issues or risks being raised often means no work is being done and that is an issue in itself.
We could find that people have stopped raising change requests, stopped reporting quality check failures. This could be for many reasons, for example the supplier and customer do not want to damage a relationship by reporting failures.
Teams often dress up their reports in the hope that things will improve or they will pull out all the stops at the last minute as they often do.
Those last two examples of things going wrong, are done in good faith, done in the spirit of team building and telling the project manager that things are as they really are will only upset them and everything will turn out fine.
Sadly things often don’t turn out fine and after a few weeks of vague progress reports and an absence of issues, we discover the painful truth, the project or programme is in deep trouble.
These things tend to be worse if we use RAG indicators, because, like above, they can be green on the outside but red on the inside, but we can save that for another day.
Despair sets in and we desperately try to get to the bottom of the issues and discover the truth, nobody wants to openly admit that they didn’t tell the truth, after all they were doing it for the right reasons, they didn’t want to upset the project or programme manager, and besides, everybody knew from the beginning that the project was a challenge, everybody knew it wouldn’t succeed but we tried anyway.
Let’s close the project and move on.
Or, we could stay and fight, get the project or programme back on track, get everyone together and replan the next stage, build more open and honest communications, be more agile in our approach, that always guarantees to deliver something, maybe not everything but at least something.
Hold a workshop to plan the recovery, make the workshop fun, introduce some games and build on our success. List the great things the team did to date, build on them, show them that things can get back on track, get everyone to buy in to the project, maybe even build a vision together.
The hardest part may be the avoidance of a blame culture, we will know the people who gave us misleading progress reports, and we need to acknowledge that they were not meant to be malicious, we need to move on, holding a grudge isn’t going to help, building, or rebuilding bridges is the way forward.
A small suggestion to bring life back into a failing project, or any planning to be honest, is to hold a planning workshop. Get the team to plan the next stage of the project, if you have more than four team members break them into sub-teams to plan exactly the same things. When each team have finished, bring them together to compare their results and you will always end up with a better plan.
Then, find the most rebellious member of the team and secretly let them know you will be leaving the workshop for a short while. While you are away, ask them to get the team to break the plans, I mean really break the plans, make sure they will not work, be extreme if needed, but break the plans, have a laugh at the project managers expense.
Then leave the workshop, and give them time to have fun.
When you return, the team may feel a little uncomfortable but a broad smile will reassure them, and, you have identified all the risks to the plan, perfectly without the need for a boring risk identification workshop that nobody attends.
Oh, before I forget, photograph the white boards and charts BEFORE you leave the workshop to break the plans. Just in case.
I think we can all see that despairing is the easy option, but fighting to fix is hard work, but nothing unusual it is the most rewarding.
This blog was inspired by listening to a podcast by Dennis Prager, he was looking at a political fight, but his common sense approach works for me. It is about three quarters of the way through if you don’t want to listen to all of it.
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