Project delays are common.  I heard many executives concerned or frustrated with projects missing critical dates.  Many organizations train project leaders in project management (PM) or even hire professional project managers to ensure that projects will meet the milestones.  Project management certifications, such as Project Management Professional® (PMP), have become a hiring preference or job requirement. 

Yet having trained project managers is seldom enough to eliminate project delays.  What is missing?  

Project managers are supposed to manage risks that can cause delays.  However, they also have to work within the confines of the organization, where senior management operate in ways incompatible with the best PM practices. 

An organization’s management practices often lead to unintended consequences, including project delays and missed deadlines.  These management practices include, for example

• Adding new projects without prioritization or additional resources
• Changing the deliverables or expanding the scope of an existing project
• Optimizing utilization by sharing the same critical resources among multiple projects
• Relying on fixed target dates in decision making without understanding the associated assumptions

The last one is worth elaborating. 

In most organizations, project managers prepare a project plan, which includes a schedule with dates of key milestones.  Some plans require more detailed activities and corresponding dates shown on a network diagram (e.g. a Gantt chart).   The activities and their durations can be uncertain, depending on the project.  For example, in a R&D or process improvement project, where the activity outcome is unpredictable and/or the method is unproven, the estimated time to complete a task can have a high degree of uncertainty. 

However, this uncertainty is not always communicated effectively to the decision makers.  A typical schedule given to the senior management is highly simplified and shows only one fixed duration or target date for each activity or milestone.  If not properly explained, this simplified schedule creates a perception of certainty that does not exist.  Unfortunately, many sponsors are not experienced in PM or are too busy to question the uncertainty in the schedule.  They subsequently use those dates for operational decisions and hold the project managers accountable for delivering on schedule.  The result is predictable.

There is no universal solution to project delays because there are many causes.  In addition to having competent project managers, senior management must recognize the impact of their own action on project success. 

The one practice that I recommend to all sponsors is to ask the project managers to show the uncertainty of milestone dates – how likely will it be completed by this date and why?

There are many ways to communicate the uncertainty.  One simple way is to show three scenarios¹.

• Most likely (or 50%/50% sooner or later than this date)
• Most optimistic (or 10% of chance sooner than this date)
• Most pessimistic (or 10% of chance later than this date)

The exact definitions of the three cases are not as important as the practice of using multiple dates to express the uncertainty.  This dialogue allows us to assess the risk more appropriately and make decisions accordingly.

In project management, the emphasis is on planning, not the plan.

1. Interested readers may want to look up the Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT).

There seems to be much confusion between strategies and goals.  Many strategies only state the desired outcomes without either 1) a meaningful connection to the organization’s unique ability to execute or 2) tough choices made based on critical analysis of risk-reward tradeoffs.  I call them wishful thinking because they are disconnected with the organization’s reality. No wonder many strategies and change initiatives fail.  A November 2017 Harvard Business Review article “Many Strategies Fail Because They’re Not Actually Strategies” touches the same point. When strategies fail in execution, just ask the employees and middle managers why.  The failure rarely was a surprise to them.

Some people believe that strategy and its implementation or execution are separate, i.e. after the strategy is defined, implementation can be developed accordingly.  I don’t.

The iterative nature of business strategy notwithstanding, the actual work of strategy implementation does follow the strategy formulation step. However, the strategy implementation framework should be part of a strategy when formulated.  

What I have observed as an employee and as a consultant is that strategies are often formulated behind closed doors in conference rooms and then announced to the organization.  The decision makers are so removed from the organization’s reality that employees scratch their heads wondering what the strategy means and where it came from.  No amount of corporate communication or change management could have saved it.

The problem is not necessarily the strategy formulation process, but the information used to create the strategy.  For example, the traditional SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis is a powerful tool.  But without an instinctive understanding tied to reality, it is only a paper exercise that makes pretty Powerpoint slides.

How can we improve strategies so they are more likely to succeed?  One thing I recommend is that leaders “Go Gemba” in a Lean term, or simply “go out and see for yourself.”

In a typical organization, frontline employees and middle managers know what is going on in the business better than anyone else. However, only a fraction of this knowledge reaches to the executive level, and sometimes inaccurately.

The danger of not being in touch with the reality is clear.  In his book Only the Paranoid Survive, Silicon Valley legend Andrew Grove shared his lessons learned from Intel’s 1994 Pentium crisis – a tiny flaw in the chip that cost them nearly half a billion dollars in less than six weeks.  He described the difficulty of senior leaders in getting the right information from the organization:

“They [middle managers] usually don’t have an easy time explaining it to senior management, so the senior management in a company is sometimes late to realize the world is changing on them – and the leader is often the last of all to know.”

He further advised:

“The lesson is, we all need to expose ourselves to the winds of change.  We need to expose ourselves to our customers, both ones who are staying with us as well as those that we may lose by sticking to the past. We need to expose ourselves to lower-level employees, who, when encouraged, will tell us a lot that we need to know. … As we throw ourselves into raw action, our senses and instincts will rapidly be honed again.”

Go Gemba if you don’t want to be the leader that is the last to know.