Voices on Project Management

by Dave Wakeman

In writing for Voices on Project Management, I like to tie everything back to a business outcome like business growth, innovation, or cost savings.

This month, I wanted to combine my focus on business growth with the new kid on the block, ChatGPT, to do some market research using a prompt to see what I came up with.

Here’s the prompt in case you’d like to steal it:

I want you to do customer research for me. Tell me 10 dreams, 10 frustrations, 10 wants, and 10 fears that my audience experiences related to business growth and innovation through the lens of project managers.

Format the 10 dreams, 10 frustrations, 10 wants, and 10 fears in a structured table. The x-axis should be numbered 1-10 and the y-axis should include frustration, want, fear, and dream.

This month, let’s look at the 10 frustrations:

1. Lack of clear vision or buy-in from leadership for growth initiatives
2. Scope creep due to shifting priorities during growth phases
3. Difficulty finding and retaining skilled team members for innovative projects
4. Siloed departments hindering collaboration and information flow
5. Unrealistic timelines imposed by leadership for innovation projects
6. Difficulty measuring the ROI of innovative projects with long-term impact
7. Lack of risk tolerance from leadership, hindering bold innovative ideas
8. Constant firefighting due to reactive decision-making instead of proactive planning
9. Difficulty adapting existing processes and workflows for innovative projects
10. Lack of recognition and appreciation for the challenges of managing innovative projects

Do we see any patterns?

I do.

These all seem consistent with a lack of strategy, especially a challenge around defining the ultimate strategic question: “What does success look like?” These also fit into the idea of business acumen, a topic I often cover.

Let’s think about what we can do to deal with these frustrations.

1. Make sure you are clear on your direction. In my strategy work, the essential question is, “What does success look like?” You must know the answer to this question because you can’t be successful without it.

A lack of vision around growth will be present because you lack direction. You can’t properly measure ROI without knowing what success look like.

All of us have likely been involved in too much firefighting. The root cause typically being decisions that are pushed off or left unmade because of a lack of direction.

2. Invest in your communications efforts. Buy in! Buy in! Buy in!

Am I right?

The time you invest in communicating the project’s scope, the place the project has in your business’s success, and the things you need to meet your timeline will help you set yourself up for success.

Poor communication is frustration’s foundation. You can only defeat this frustration by being clear, concise, and easily understood in your communications.

Your ability to achieve this is built from the answer to the ultimate question: “What does success look like?”

3. Manage up and down. Project managers have to manage in both directions to cut down on frustrations.

• Managing down will help you hire and retain key team members.
• Managing up will help you fight scope creep, gain buy-in, and fight unrealistic timelines.

Looking at ChatGPT’s list, the frustration of silos points to the importance of managing across the organization as well.

Your ability to manage up, down and around the organization is built on your direction and your ability to communicate effectively. Granted, you still aren’t guaranteed success.

My questions to you are: Do these frustrations track with your experience? Is there a frustration that you don’t see on the list? Or, is this list totally crazy?

Let me know below!

Then, next month we can look at one of the other columns.

By Marian Haus, PMP

There is obviously a high interest in the project management community and literature about what drives project success. For example, searching online for “why projects succeed” will return you five times more web pages than “why projects fail.” Similarly, there are four times more pages about “project success factors” than “project failure factors.”

This is no coincidence! The overwhelming interest in project success insights is driven by the struggle of many organizations and project managers to understand what drives success.

But before answering the question of why projects succeed, let’s first try to define project success.

The most common definition of success is delivering the project on time, on budget and in scope. PMI’s PMBOK Guide^® says a project is successful if the following parameters are met: product and project quality, timeliness, budget compliance and customer satisfaction.

Others define project success by measuring the project ROI (or business case) over a certain period of time. If the ROI is positive, the project is declared successful, regardless of its deviations along the way.

I have my own definition: A project is successful if it meets its given goals, within acceptable variance boundaries (e.g., in terms of scope, time or budget). This is a relative definition and relies on the fact that the world is not perfect. Hence even a successful project will rarely be a 100 percent success.

A civil construction project might be declared successful if it meets its scope and quality. Acceptable time or budget deviations might not be seen as failure. Similarly, an IT project might be declared successful if it meets its scope on time, with acceptable deviations from quality or budget.

A project’s success is relative: it depends on how the success criteria and metrics are defined from the very beginnings of the project, along with who will measure them.

OK, there are clearly many definitions of project success. Similarly, there are also many views and studies on why projects succeed.

Let’s take a look at a few studies and try to find a common denominator.

According to PMI’s 2015 Pulse of the Profession®: Capturing the Value of Project Management, over the last three years the number of projects meeting their goals—hence being successful—has remained steady at about two-thirds of projects. This success is the result of organizations supporting project excellence by focusing on fundamental aspects of culture, talent and process.

But size matters, too. A Gartner study from 2012 shows that small IT projects (below US$350,000) are more likely to succeed than big projects (budgets over US$1 million).

Other studies reveal that project success is tightly linked to clear project objectives and requirements that are fully understood and supported by actively engaged stakeholders.

My view on the common denominator that leads to project success is simple: the main drivers of project success are rarely of a technical nature. Instead, the drivers are the basics of the project management culture and discipline within the project organization.

In other words, fix the project management basics, and your chances of reaching project success will increase.