Voices on Project Management

By Lynda Bourne

A conversation with a clerk in a HR department looking to procure a training program and the passing of English actor George Cole in early August made me start thinking about the art of the deal.

Cole’s defining role was “Arfur” Daley, the devious “spiv” on TV’s Minder. Arfur was always offering deals that were too good to refuse. The deals were rarely outright crooked, but Arfur regularly needed his minder’s help to get out of trouble.

My recent conversation with the HR clerk (and time spent watching TV shopping channels) suggests the Arfur Daley approach to creating a deal that is too good to refuse is still very much part of modern business.

The reason for this post is to help project team members tasked with purchasing goods or recommending the preferred supplier cut through the communication hype to see the real value in a proposition. There is no such thing as a free set of steak knives!

The first step in making the best buying decision is to remember that only two elements really matter: acquiring the goods or services you need and the price you pay.

The second step is to be really clear about what you need. Defining the appropriate quality and quantity for tangible goods is easy. It’s much more difficult to work out what represents a good training option or the best value consultancy service.

Then there’s the price! What’s the better deal: a $600 product with a special discount of 25 percent or its $500 competitor with a discount of only 10 percent?  

Then one of your colleagues suggests talking to a local business. Its rack price is $440, but they don’t offer discounts. Is this a better option? Assuming all other factors are equal, what matters is the final price you pay, not the discount. It’s fairly easy to work out once you ignore the spin.

$600 minus 25% = $450
$500 minus 10% = $450
$440 minus 0% = $440

Moving beyond price, the inducements to make you buy from a particular business are many. The challenge is applying discipline to your decision-making process. The problem with most of the “fantastic free offers” and “no-cost extras” is that they are only valuable if you actually need them and can use them.

Remember that all “free” offers are priced into the cost of the goods or services. Most organisations who run training courses (including us) advertise that every trainee receives free access to on-line revision tools or practice questions.

But when we are setting the price of the course, the $50 we pay for the on-line licence is included, along with the “free” coffee and all the other expenses we have to cover before we can start making a profit. The course price includes all our costs plus a profit margin. If it didn’t, we would quickly be bankrupt.

The challenge with the free extras and other inclusions is deciding if they are of any value to you, since you will be paying for them anyway. For example, one PMP training course costs $2,000. The other costs $3,000 but includes free access to online training in four Microsoft Office programs, each “valued at $500.” Superficially the $2,000 in free extras makes the more expensive course seem a better value. But is it? Ask yourself:

1. Who can use the training—just the PMP candidate or anyone?
2. Do the people who can access the free training actually need it? If the training was really needed, why have we not already organized it?
3. What is the real value of the extra free courses? If you can buy a full set of Microsoft Office training courses for $800, that’s the value, not the 4 x $500 advertised by the seller.
4. What discount will the vendor offer if you opt out of the free courses? This is usually much less than the nominal values.

The reason this type of free offer is so common is that it’s cheap to deliver and most people never use the free offer anyway, even if they intend to.

You also need to be aware of the anchoring effect. If at the start of your investigation, you were told the typical cost of a PMP course was between $4,000 and $5,000, this price anchors your expectations. The $3,000 price will seem like great value and the $2,000 price too cheap to be viable. The anchoring effect is an innate bias that changes our perceptions of value, and the Arfurs of this world know how to use it to their advantage!

All of these sales tactics can be used legitimately. From the seller’s perspective, the purpose of “free” extras is to offer things that are of genuine value to the buyer but cost very little to deliver. But as the buyer, you must learn to ignore the headline price of the free extras and consider what the final package is really worth to you. If you don’t need something, its real value to you is always $0.00!

The factors that make a real difference to most service deliveries are much harder to compare. You will generally pay more for a more experienced consultant or a better quality trainer. Buying this type of service on price alone is rarely the best approach—a basic rule of business is you tend to get what you pay for.

The challenge then is to set up a decision matrix that looks at the elements that really matter in your buying decisions and then make an informed decision. Some of these factors may be measureable. Others, such as cultural fit, are critically important but entirely subjective.

The bottom line here is that before you can get to the serious decision-making, you need to clear away the confusion of the special offers and discounts. The Arfurs of this world are always looking to make you an offer you can’t refuse.

How do you approach your buying decisions?

By Lynda Bourne

Project stakeholders can be helpful, obstructionist and almost everything in between. The good news is that how you deal with most stakeholders is largely up to you! The only certainty is your stakeholders are not about to go away and leave you in peace.

As you’ll see below, there are three basic ways to deal with stakeholders.

1) Crisis Management

With this approach, you basically choose to ignore the stakeholder problem until something dramatic happens—and then you react to deal with what has become a crisis! 

Doing nothing may seem like a good idea when confronted with all of the other demands of the project, but this is misguided. When the crisis erupts, you are reacting to someone else’s agenda. This places you in a vulnerable situation. The atmosphere is typically hostile, and the time and effort needed to recover the situation can easily exceed the time and effort needed to employ alternative options.

2) Stakeholder Management

This approach is proactive rather than reactive. By proactively managing your stakeholder community, you will eliminate most of the crises and be in a much stronger position to deal with any issues that do “blow up.” 

Stakeholder management involves identifying the members of your stakeholder community, recognizing their needs and expectations, and implementing a planned communication strategy to maximize their support for the project and minimize any opposition.

Through regular, planned communication activities, you seek to identify issues and problems before they become significant. You take appropriate steps to exploit opportunities and defend against emerging threats and problems. As with any management function, the manager seeks to control and optimize the situation.

This is essentially a “push” process and includes elements such as reporting, public relations (PR) and, in larger projects and programs, may extend to customer relationship management (CRM).

3) Stakeholder Engagement

This approach requires a paradigm shift in thinking! Rather than trying to manage stakeholders to achieve the predetermined outcome your project was established to deliver, stakeholder engagement invites stakeholders to become part of the process designed to fulfill their requirements.

The solution delivered through the project evolves and adapts based on the interaction between the project team and its key stakeholders. Opening up to stakeholders and inviting them to be part of the solution requires letting go of the concept of “one correct solution.”

In place of the answer, the project team and stakeholders work together to develop an agreed-upon outcome. 

The concept of stakeholder engagement is a central tenet of the Agile Manifesto. But agile approaches aren’t the only way to open up the power of stakeholder engagement. Many modern forms of project contracts, typically used on major construction and engineering contracts, recognize that collaboration between key stakeholders reduces risk and increases the value of the project for everyone. 

Alliance contracts, early contractor involvement (ECI) contracts, and various forms of partnerships and supply chain arrangements all seek to replace the command-and-control management approach to delivering defined outcomes, based on inflexible contract conditions, with collaborative working arrangements focused on achieving a mutually beneficial outcome.

Breaking habits formed over decades of “hard contracting,” and the almost routine litigation that follows, is not easy. But it does seem to be worth the effort.

Numerous surveys (primarily in the U.K. construction sector) have consistently shown that the client gets a better outcome for less cost and the contractors make more profits working in a collaborative environment where everyone is pulling in the same direction. Similar results have emerged from projects employing agile approaches, where the magic trifecta of “better, cheaper and quicker” seems to be regularly achieved.

So my question to you is: Are you still operating in crisis management mode when it comes to stakeholders? Or have you moved toward effective stakeholder management? And are you willing to take the plunge and go for full-on stakeholder engagement? 

Stakeholder engagement is not an easy option. It requires a range of skills quite different from traditional stakeholder management, but the results are definitely worth the effort! The beauty of stakeholder engagement is that you open up to your stakeholders and allow them to help you successfully deliver their requirements.

It’s a real win-win outcome.

By Lynda Bourne

Stakeholders are becoming increasingly vocal in their demands for “good governance.” The rise of stakeholder activism (shareholders are stakeholders, too) is affecting the way organizations of all types are governed and managed.

This will in turn impact the way projects are initiated and managed—which could affect your career.

But when thinking about what good governance looks like, be careful not to confuse it with good management. They aren’t the same! Governance is firstly focused on creating the environment in which good management can flourish, and then on ensuring the organization’s management is good.

Global organizations are finding their stakeholders and shareholders less and less tolerant of governance failures that lead to bad management. This lack of tolerance manifests itself through government investigations and criminal prosecutions against organizations of all types and sizes—from FIFA on down.

All this means the project failures that may have been acceptable in the past are unlikely to be tolerated in the future. Stakeholders increasingly expect organizations to proactively and effectively manage their investments in projects and programs.  

This entails both the “management of projects,” focused on the full value chain from the initial investment decision through benefits realization, and the traditional domains of project, program and portfolio management.

Achieving excellence across the value chain will not be easy. The goal does offer an opportunity for the project management profession to expand its influence beyond the narrow confines of project management into the broader arena of the “management of projects,” which will involve project management advocacy in both senior management circles and governance circles. (Organizations such as PMI are already actively involved in this work .)

Know Your Functions

An understanding of the difference between management and governance is critical for such advocacy to be effective.

The primary focus of the governing body in any organization should be balancing the competing interests of its diverse stakeholder community. The six functions of governance are:

·         G1 - Determining the objectives of the organization

·         G2 - Determining the ethics of the organization

·         G3 - Creating the culture of the organization

·         G4 - Designing and implementing the governance framework for the organization

·         G5 - Ensuring accountability by management

·         G6 - Ensuring compliance by the organization

The functions of management focus on achieving the organization’s objectives within the framework established by the governing body. As defined by Henri Fayol in his 1916 book “Administration Industrielle et Generale,” the five functions of management are:

·         M1 - To forecast and plan

·         M2 - To organise

·         M3 - To command or direct (lead)

·         M4 - To coordinate

·         M5 - To control (in the sense that a manager must receive feedback about a process in order to make necessary adjustments)

This diagram plots the relationship between the governance and management functions. Management functions are assumed to be hierarchal with the governance inputs cascading down to lower-level functions.

The challenge for many organizations is establishing an effective governance framework to frame and oversee the work of its management,  thereby avoiding the scandals we read about all too frequently.

The question that interests me is: How can we start to influence the top end of our organizations to allow the efficient delivery of the right projects and programs, managed the right way?

If the project management profession doesn’t step up to this challenge, someone else will. How do you think you can start to build influence?

By Lynda Bourne

The fundamental reason any organization chooses to undertake projects and programs is to realize or create value for some or all of its stakeholders.

Project managers are key people in this overall value chain; they create the outputs that enable the organization to change. If the project’s deliverables are used, the intended outcomes should be achieved and benefits realized. Finally, if the benefits support the organization’s strategy, value is created.

But what is value, and how can it be assessed and measured?

For instance, if a charity successfully completes a fundraising project to upgrade its mobile soup kitchen, it is able to deliver more meals to more homeless people. But this increases weekly operating costs (there is a negative cash flow), and the value proposition of more disadvantaged people getting a hot meal in the evening is nearly impossible to quantify in financial terms.

In other words, value has been created, but it is not measurable in terms of financial returns. Therefore, the concept of benefits should be expanded to include both financial benefits and other stakeholder requirements. 

Benefits, Costs and Value

A useful definition of value is the ratio between the satisfaction of needs (benefits, expectations and requirements), which may be tangible or intangible, and the use of resources (money, people, time, energy and materials), which will normally be definable in terms of cost.

V (value) ∝B (benefits) / $(cost)

However, the units of measure are often unrelated, so the equation is shown as a proportionality rather than equality—it’s difficult to directly align the cost of the mobile kitchen and its supplies against full stomachs and potentially the increased status of the charity.

Managing the overall concept of value creation to maximize value for the organization’s stakeholders requires a coordinated approach by the whole organization. The key elements of such an approach are:

·        A value-oriented strategy

·        Portfolio management to select the most valuable projects and programs for the organization to undertake. Even in commercial businesses, this requires ways of assessing total value, not just financial returns.

·        Project managers need to keep in mind maximizing benefits realization and value creation when making project decisions.

·        The organization’s change management needs to be effective and aligned to ensure the intended benefits are actually realized.

·        The organization’s governance systems need to require management to report on the final outcomes in terms of the total value realized from the original decision to invest in a project or program.

This framework is relatively easy to describe; the difficult issue is creating a language that describes value from the perspective of the organization and its stakeholders.

For the charity, value may be defined as serving more meals cost-effectively, or reaching more people in need or being seen as the leading soup kitchen in the area (i.e., achieving elevated prestige). Different concepts of what is valuable can shift the focus of both the project and the way the project’s deliverables are used.

In commercial situations, the challenge is deciding how much value is attached to options such as:

·        A mining project spending additional resources on environmental protection in excess of the minimum required by law to achieve a better outcome

·        A project expending resources to enhance stakeholder engagement efforts

·        A project manager spending budget on clerical support to help implement project management processes more effectively

Which options are chosen will always be based on the specific context of the organization, its ethics and culture. What matters is making sure the understanding of value is consistent and agreed to by the organization’s governors and key stakeholders, and incorporated into portfolio, project and change management practices.

Are you discussing real value with your stakeholders?

By Lynda Bourne

Most organizations that take change management seriously have processes in place to train staff, reconfigure work practices and provide frontline support to ensure the project’s deliverables are effectively used to create value.

Many organizations are now also tracking the realization of benefits once the project is finished and its product has been transitioned to operations or the client—closing the loop back to the promised benefits in the business case.

However, there is an emerging body of evidence that while “business as usual” change—for example, to introduce an upgraded software system or market a new product—is fairly well understood, this type of change is very different from transformational change focused on reinventing the organization in some way.

There is confusion about what constitutes change versus transformation. We have a good idea of how to manage change, but most organizations continue to struggle with transformation.

Change management means implementing finite initiatives, which may or may not cut across the organization. The focus is on executing a well-defined shift in the way things work. By applying well-known change management principles and tools—including explaining the reason for the change, building a coalition of leaders, engaging stakeholders and executing with discipline—there is a good chance the change will go smoothly and the expected benefits realized.

Organizational transformation is altogether different.The objective of transformation is not just to execute a defined change, but to reinvent the organization, change culture and behaviors, and discover (rather than create) a new way of working based on a vision for the future.

For example, a transformational change could involve moving from a traditional sales model with sales representatives and brick-and-mortar stores to a 100 percent online sales and marketing presence.

Unlike change management, transformation management cannot simply focus on a few discrete, well-defined shifts. It must focus on a coordinated portfolio of interdependent initiatives.

Delivering the capabilities for this type of initiative is the realm of program management, because multiple projects will be needed to build the different elements required for the overall transition. Those multiple projects, requiring multiple change initiatives, together lead the organization on a journey of discovery toward its new future state. Even if successful change management leads to the successful implementation of certain initiatives within the transformation portfolio, the overall transformation could still fail.

This type of transformation is far more unpredictable, iterative and experimental than traditional project or program management, and consequently entails much higher risk. The key elements needed to build success are a clear vision of the final outcome, good stakeholder engagement and flexibility to adapt the program of work based on feedback from earlier initiatives.

The ultimate vision may not change, but the route to success will require continuous adaptation to overcome obstacles and exploit opportunities.