Beat The Odds On Your Way To Project Success
What makes a project successful?
One of my research interests is why projects fail, and occasionally I find myself standing in front of groups of people explaining what makes a promising project fall short. It’s a pretty gloomy topic, so after thoroughly depressing everyone by covering the statistics (71% of projects fail each year! But only 0.5% of project managers admit to working on a failed or failing project – how does that work?) I also talk about how we can beat failure.
Everyone has their own tricks to ensure their projects stay on track. Like high school students sitting exams, we all have our equivalent of lucky underwear. In fact, if you start looking for advice on what makes projects successful, you’ll find it by the bucket load. Ideas will flow your way until you have so much that you could easily spend all your time doing the things that prevent project failure, and not doing the things that get your project done. So how do you choose what actually works?
One of the advantages of meeting people through facilitating seminars is that I get to talk to experts in their fields. Put 40 project managers in a room and you’ll end up with some strong opinions, but at least you’ll know that they are speaking from experience. Their techniques work.
So standing in front of a group of delegates recently, I asked them what they do to make their projects a success. We came up with 27 different things to do to improve the chances of a project not failing from the simple (“test”) to the obscure (“GOBIGL”). Several themes were evident, and as we grouped the responses on a flip chart the top three tips for project success became clear.
1. Manage your stakeholders
Work out who your key stakeholders are – the list is likely to be much longer than your first expect. Involve the project team in identifying different internal and external stakeholder groups as by yourself you’ll never think of everyone. Then prioritise: who from that list needs to be involved in the project? Establish a governance framework of key stakeholders with regular meetings. You’ll probably end up with several different groups: your project steering group, of course, but also others. How about holding a user forum? What group of people need to see your weekly progress report?
Absolute support from key management stakeholders and your project sponsor is the number one thing for project success. After all, if your sponsor isn’t interested in the end result, why are you bothering?
2. Manage your risks
First things first: you can’t manage risks unless you work out what those risks are. Spend some time upfront with your project team identifying all the things that could go wrong. Then put some action plans in place straight away to mitigate against them.
Risk management is not just a one-off exercise. You should do monthly risk review meetings, but don’t feel that the project team have to wait until that session before they raise a risk with you for the log: they can (and should) be sending you details of impending risks as soon as they become aware of them themselves.
3. Expect and manage change
What you set out to do at the beginning of a project will not be what you deliver at the end. Period. Unfortunately life doesn’t stand still, and neither does business. The requirements and scope may change as the business evolves over the lifecycle of the project or as your end customer develops a better appreciation of what they have asked for.
If you expect change to happen you will be better at handling it when it comes along. What is your change control process? How are revisions to scope or plan going to be handled? Early on, identify how you will get stakeholders to approve all changes. Then when the inevitable happens, your change management procedure can swing into action creating the least disruption to the project possible.
There is no secret formula for project success: if there was, the statistics about project failure wouldn’t be so disheartening and project managers salaries would be several times what they are today. Many things conspire to make projects fail, but getting the basics right and following the tips above will go a long way to making sure your project isn’t one of those.
Oh, and if anyone was wondering about GOBIGL, it stands for get out before it goes live!
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From someone that has seen a lot of failed projects, I wish I would have read this a long time ago! Love the advice. Thanks.