How Open Is Your Project?

 

You need to let people and information into your project to accomplish something. But not all. Some stakeholders might suck the life out of your team while information can be irrelevant and just darn confusing.

If your project is an intervention in a larger organization, your project boundaries are like a membrane. Some stuff gets in, some stuff gets out, some stuff doesn't pass the project boundaries ever. Your project is a temporary structure within the host organization. This cocoon allows you to do your thing without having too much interference from the outside world.

It needs to be a membrane. If you seal of your project so no information gets out, or your move your cocoon to some obscure, remote part of an organization, out of sight, you get other issues.

During the PMI Global Congress earlier this month in Washington DC one of the interesting speakers was Vivek Kundra. He is the CIO of the United States. The one responsible for all IT spending in the US government. He talked among other things about failing projects in the federal IT arena.

About multi-billion dollar projects that are years behind schedule and might deliver results that might be obsolete when launched. That kind of projects.
 

Shining Light

One of the initiatives he talked about to tackle the problem I found very interesting. Especially in the way it is phrased: to shine light. Make sure that every IT investment is visible to everyone.  For this purpose the US government launched the IT Dashboard in the summer of 2009. This highlights the status of major IT projects and identifies worst performing projects and root causes.

The dashboard also provides the name and contact information of the official responsible for the execution. Vivek Kundra mentioned in his speech that citizens contact people from troubled projects and point them to cheaper alternative solutions.

After setting up the dashboard, departments halted and terminated some troubled projects. Of course it is hard to establish of the IT Dashboard was the direct cause for this. But getting feedback from the outside about your own performance can create miracles.

If you are working in a closed system with feedback just from within the system, the information can get contaminated. Unchallenged groupthink can lead to biased opinions about the state of the investment.