How To Make YOUR Project Failproof

Many of you probably wouldn’t know that I cut my leadership teeth on large software development projects as a project manager. And throughout my career, I’ve had executive or sponsorship accountability for large projects in construction, procurement, major asset overhaul, and capital efficiency.

So, when I get to talk about projects, it’s like putting on a favorite old pair of slippers.

How often do we hear leaders claim that their project was delivered “on time, and on budget”.

This is often wildly misleading, because it depends on your reference point. I always ask a couple of pointed questions to sort out the dogs from the fleas.

• Was it delivered to the original budget, and on the original delivery date, or are you comparing it to the fourth delay and budget increase that were forced as the project veered off the track from its original approval parameters?
• What was delivered on time and on budget? Was it the full functionality that was originally promised, or was it a much watered down version, as you had to strip out features to meet the deadlines? Many projects end up delivering what we call MVP – minimum viable product – instead of the all-singing all-dancing version that was originally scoped out
• What was the quality like? What short cuts did you have to take to keep the project on track?

So, you’ll probably agree with me that “on time and on budget” isn’t as impressive as it may first seem!

I want to just briefly fly over the 7 things that, in my experience, you need to do to make your project failproof:

1. Find the project owner… and make them own it! In my experience, lack of clear project ownership is a key point of failure. The project sponsor has to make the critical decisions that drive the project… but many see it as an honorific post
2. Make accountabilities within the project team super clear. This means providing extreme clarity in accountability between the teams that are running the project, and those that will ultimately have to live with the outcomes the project produces
3. Respect the stage gates. If you have a significant project that requires incremental approval at different points, don’t treat the reviews and approvals as a faît accompli… don’t fall in love with your project – you need to be serious about examining whether the project still stacks up, based on what you learnt in the previous phase. And you need to be prepared to kill it, if that’s the best option.
4. Track the right things during execution. Tracking budget and time is important, but even more important is the concept of earned value. For you finance heads, think of it like an accounting accrual. If you’ve expended 40% of the budget and time, you should also have completed 40% of the work. Quite often, we see a situation where 40% or the money and time have been expended, but only 10% of the progress milestones have been achieved… this is an early warning sign of impending doom, for anyone who cares to look!
5. Be project literate. One of the critical things that often causes problems is sunk cost fallacy. This is when a person is reluctant to abandon the project because they’ve invested heavily in it, even though it’s clear that abandonment would be more beneficial.
6. Never lose sight of the ultimate purpose of the project. The purpose of the project isn’t to deliver a project… It’s to produce an outcome that enables the company to generate profitable growth. If it doesn’t do that, you might need to rethink it a little!  
7. Put individuals on the hook for delivering the benefits, not just the project. Benefits recovery is the name of the game. The project isn’t a succes until the projected benefits are accrued.