Business Goals: Where's the Accountability?

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

 

If you look at surveys of project managers and their teams, one of the questions often asked is about the understanding of why projects are being done--the business purpose behind the project. The numbers for those questions have improved significantly over recent years; I saw one recently that suggested that 84% of project managers understood the business benefits that were driving the project that they were managing. That’s pretty good, but it still implies that one in seven projects out there are being managed by someone who has absolutely no idea why the work is being done!

When we look at project team members, the numbers are generally nowhere near as positive. In recent years, the surveys have suggested that we’ve gotten to the point where more than half of team members now understand why projects are being undertaken--but that’s hardly a cause for celebration. When I was discussing those numbers with someone recently, they suggested that project managers had a lot to answer for if they weren’t helping their team members to understand the project purpose. Well…yes, but if the project manager is responsible for providing that explanation, then the sponsor has to be accountable for it--and they are rarely held to that accountability. As projects become more focused on business benefits rather than project deliverables, that’s …

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