I’ve noted that consistently good project results are hard to come by, yet most organisations continue to think they’re doing a great job. It’s got to the stage where project failure has become so commonplace that we’ve started to see it as success, or we just aren’t seeing clearly at all. To illustrate this disconnect, in a recent KPMG survey of New Zealand businesses, 61 per cent of organisations surveyed believed project success rates were improving, despite the fact that they weren’t!

Thinking every project will be successful is the root cause of many project problems; there is simply no data to indicate that will ever be the case. Indeed, IBM found that only 41 per cent of projects ever hit their project plan targets. For the New Zealand businesses surveyed in the KPMG study, the figure was 33 per cent.

Today we expect every single project to be successful, but even when they aren’t we convince ourselves they are rather than admitting they failed!

The Victorian Ombudsman’s report into failed ICT projects found, ‘Too often, there was muted acceptance that all ICT-enabled projects go wrong’. This needn’t be the case. It’s important to recognise at the start that not every venture will be successful.

Maybe it’s time we planned to fail more in order to succeed more?

In The New Rules of Management, Peter Cook uses a school analogy to highlight the folly of thinking that every single project will be successful: ‘Failing 50% of your subjects or your exams is not a good strategy for school. So we learn to try not to fail anything. However for life, failing 50% of your projects is a great strategy. Aiming to fail 50% of your projects is the perfect way to embrace the risk inherent in any worthwhile project’.

I tend to agree. In my experience, we never delivered 100 per cent of the projects we promised we would at the start of the year. Every quarter the portfolio would be reviewed for ongoing viability and priority, which would often lead to widespread changes to meet the ever-evolving demands of the business.

Peter Cook again: ‘Often we don’t commit to serious goals and projects because of the risk of failing. What will it mean about me if I really go for it and don’t get there? What will other people think? What will I think?’ When it comes to results, failing a project may be the best result. The key here is that you gave it everything.

You may be unable to make a 100 per cent commitment for a variety of reasons. Here are three:

• Workload. You simply have too much on your plate, and adding another project — without being clear on your priorities — overwhelms you.
• Lack of buy-in. The project is the brainchild (or pet!) of someone else within the organisation and you’ve been asked to lead it, even though you’re unconvinced it’s something the organisation should be doing.
• You don’t know how to. Let’s face it, sponsoring projects is something everyone assumes you can do as soon as you are appointed to a senior management role. In reality, it’s not just another hat for you to wear; it’s a completely different set of clothes, and often there’s no one there to help you choose and dress.

To achieve the results expected — both in terms of product delivery during the project and benefit realisation afterwards — it’s absolutely paramount that you commit 100 per cent. Anything less and failure will undoubtedly follow. In First Things First, Stephen Covey suggests that this commitment is key but also observes that ‘basing our happiness on our ability to control everything is futile’.

You need to establish what Covey calls a ‘compass’ and a ‘clock’. Both are equally important, though each of us tends to favour one over the other. By compass, he means vision, values, principles, mission, behaviours, conscience direction (what we feel is important and how we’ll work together). By clock, he means commitments, appointments, benefits, schedules, goals, activities (what we need to do and how we manage our time).

During the pre-project business case construction phase, organisations expend a lot of words articulating the clock — burning platform, hard and fast deadlines, building capability, increasing capacity and a load of other nauseating jargon to avoid establishing concrete measures around the $10 million in savings promised.

Generally, dates and costs have been estimated during strategy development and are based on best-case scenarios that almost never materialise. It’s important to remember that any dates and costs at this early stage are indicative only and can quite easily change by +/– 100 per cent once you get into the project planning detail.

The planning phase is where you confirm the clock elements of your project. People (it’s never resources), equipment, deliverables, dates, quality, costs, structures and objectives — these factors form the foundation for the project, but only when paired with the compass elements. Without creating a vision of the future, and agreeing how you’ll behave and work together, delivery will be fraught, fractured and fragile. These projects are liable to break down at any minute, as the only thing holding them together is the paperwork created.

While it will be important for your project (and organisation) to ensure that certain forms are filled at certain times, this is no measure of a successful project. As Jim Highsmith reminds us in his book Agile Project Management, ‘Compliance results are different’.

Compliance results may be important but are not an effective barometer on whether a project is achieving the expected results. That’s not to say you should mistrust the reporting of project managers, but it should always be married with real-time feedback from those working on the project or involved in the building of its products.

As a project sponsor, you must involve yourself not only in regularly assessing the compass and clock results, but also in taking corrective action where there is the slightest deviation. On one project I was sponsor on, I gathered feedback on the performance of the project manager as well as checking the detail of the report. The report indicated that everything was rosy, but feedback on the project manager’s performance was poor.

I advised the project manager of what needed to change and set him a goal of a month to make the corrections. Four weeks later, not only had the project manager addressed the behaviours, but he’d also empowered the team to provide monthly feedback on the things he could improve.

On a different project, the (contract) project manager didn’t respond to the challenges the team had with his behaviours and I let him go. Our projects are too important to be held back by inefficient individuals or suppliers. This is just one example of where you’ll have to make tough decisions to get the results you expect.

Traditionally we have only ever measured the clock elements of a project. McKinsey found that most leadership programs fail because businesses don’t track and manage leadership performance over time. The same is true of projects, though I’m pleased to say that this is changing.

In his TED talk ‘Being brilliant every day’ Dr Alan Watkins suggests that ‘in order to change the result or performance, you have to focus on the behaviour’. That will involve people changing how they think, feel and express their emotions. Being a project sponsor means being a role model and helping people to do this, not just approving a project status report.

Driving for and achieving results — through successfully delivering or failing projects — is your responsibility and a skill that every senior manager and project sponsor should have. Every decision you make should safeguard these results and support the organisation’s strategic intent.

Never forget that you get the results your leadership deserves. Only you can affect that.