The Importance of 'Why'

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.

  Benefits Realization   Scope Management  

Why do we undertake a project? It’s certainly not because someone decided that the organization desperately needs a particular set of features by a certain date and for a given cost. That might be the mechanics of what happens in the project, but it’s not the reason for doing it.

Projects are done to deliver some form of benefit, nothing more and nothing less. That may be a predictable operational benefit (more revenue or less cost), it may be a necessary benefit (compliance with regulatory requirements) or it may be a foundational benefit (enabling other projects to be undertaken in the future to deliver their own benefits).

So if projects are done to deliver benefits to the organization, it follows that effective management of the project should focus on ensuring we are always maximizing the chances of delivering that benefit. Unfortunately, too often that doesn’t happen, and I believe a lot of the problem comes down to the failure to ask “Why?” In this article, I’m going to try and explain what I mean and perhaps guide PMs and their teams to ask the question a little more often.

Why this project, why now?
For many project managers and teams, the default starting point for a project is the scope. From that, plans are developed that focus on delivering all of the features within the financial and schedule constraints that are …

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