It’s Magic

Project success can seem like a magic trick, the audience isn’t quite sure what happened and, even if they know how the trick works, it can still appear magical. So, it is with project success. The number of books written, methodologies identified, and the number of diplomas and certifications available suggest that project management is an extremely complex, challenging, and potentially rewarding career. The interesting thing is, we manage projects as a normal part of our lives. From getting a job to cooking a meal, taking care of a lawn to painting a room, taking a vacation to going to college. Almost everything we do requires creating a plan to obtain a specific outcome and then executing that plan which is what project management is in its simplest form. What are the inherent challenges of creating a successful project? Where do these challenges come from? Where in the project life cycle do projects begin to fail? While failure is frequently discovered towards the end of a project, it rarely starts where it is discovered. Intrinsically, we sense that it isn’t the end where failure occurs, it is simply where it is noticed. How do we, with all the education, knowledge, historical information, and brain power available still find ourselves pushing hard toward the end line, sacrificing our personal lives for a work project?

Where and why do projects fail? Projects fail because we fail to practice the due diligence and rigor necessary at the very beginning. They fail before the project start date, prior to anyone beginning the work associated with the plan. Failure occurs when we begin work before we consider where the end line is, what it will take to get there, and why we are doing the work. Failure occurs every step along the project plan when we do work that is unplanned, unscheduled, and out of scope. Failure occurs when we start work prior to clearly defining the work. Failure occurs when assumptions are made without writing them down or eliminating the assumption and gathering the necessary details. Failure occurs when we fail to audit the work done through reviews or other means of verification and validation. It isn’t the big things that create project failure, it is a myriad of small details missed along the way.

Knowing the answer to where and why projects fail hasn’t seemed to prevent projects from failing. That would imply that project failure is always one of the possible outcomes for every project started. It is always possible that we won’t get a job, cook a delightful meal, have a beautiful lawn, or have a delightful vacation. Failure can always occur. Instead of avoiding that possible outcome, what if we embraced that as one of the many possibilities? What constructs would we put in place, what guard rails would be available, what exit strategies would be manifest, and what conversations would we have if we discussed the possibility of failure and discovered the opportunities available? What if we documented the myriad of small things that could go wrong, the failures that could occur along the way, and that could occur, and built our plan around those items? Yes, this does sound like risk analysis and mitigation, mostly because it is that very tool that could be used to embrace failure as a possibility.

The biggest barrier to project success is us. It isn’t as if we don’t know how to have a successful project, it is as if we believe nothing will go wrong if we push on, move forward, and ignore the warning signs. The cautionary flags of wrong resource for the job, work taking more effort, an increase in error rates, or the number of hours we are putting in continues to climb without an end in sight. It is as if the warning signs are invisible to us, like knowing the magic trick and not seeing the slight of hand. We know what is necessary to create a successful project. We fail to hold ourselves to the rigor and due diligence necessary and we fail to hold every project team member to the same level of rigor and due diligence, especially the client.

Take a moment, do a quick inventory of where you are in the project, review the current health of the project you are managing and ask yourself one question. What am I practicing today? If you find that you are spending more hours than the agreed upon amount (and if there isn’t an agreement you may want to create one), if you find that there are more mistakes being made than expected or than what had been occurring a month ago, if you are discovering a higher level of resource turn over, if your client meetings are filled with additional documentation requests, you may be in the midst of or at the beginning of the signs of project failure occurring. This is the time to ask, what do we need to do in this moment to capture what is occurring and then create a go to green plan. A plan to get the unhealthy into a healthier state. The issues will be in the details, and it would be best to identify and create a plan to resolve those issues, even if it requires moving the date and cost additional capital. It is better to be clear about where you are, only then can you plan the path to where you are going.