Dealing With a Project That is Not Meeting Deadlines

In a recent post I outlined eight signs that are leading indicators for a project that can be expected not to reach its goals and targets in a timely manner. This post will highlight how best to deal with the seventh of these signs, a project that is not meeting deadlines.

Why is this a problem? In my discussions with executives across the world, the first complaint that they usually give about internal project teams is that they do not deliver the end-results of the project on time. You can be pretty sure that a project that is not meeting interim deadlines is highly likely not to meet the final deadlines as well (independent of what your project manager tells you).

In addition to this, I find that delays to intermediate deadlines are very often a sign of other potential issues. Typically, the delays are caused by the team not being able to make sufficient time available for the project, the team spending too much on the wrong activities (such as data gathering or interviews), or the team being very uncomfortable with the basic premises of the project (background, goals, expected deliverables, etc).

What can you as a project sponsor do if one of the project teams that you are responsible for is missing intermediate deadlines? My key message is not to let it slide, as it is very unlikely that the problem will go away by itself. The first action you need to take is to sit with the team and demand a fairly detailed explanation of why deadlines that have been agreed in their project plan have been missed (this assumes that the team has had input to the plan and has accepted the key deadlines in this plan). In this discussion, you should be prepared to dig beyond the standard answers to uncover the true reasons for the delays. A standard answer you will hear is that the team has not had sufficient time to carry out the activities. This is almost always true, but should have been known to the team when they agreed to the project plan. You therefore need to push the responsibility for sticking to the plan firmly back to the team.

However, I do also see situations where the project team's opportunity to allocate time to the project has decreased due to changes in priorities within the organization. If you are facing this situation, you will need to be prepared to act. You will need to understand what these new issues are and why they require time from members of your project. You will need to discuss alternatives with the other executives claiming time from your team members. If it is not possible to solve the issues related to the available time, you will need to develop (together with the team) alternative plans. This can involve reducing the scope of the project, delaying key milestones, or adding resources. Each of these solutions has its own pros and cons and needs to be analyzed in the specific context of the project and the organization.

However, in my experience, the most usual reason for a team not meeting deadlines is that the delays are caused by the project team spending too much time on certain activities (i.e. data collection, analytics, etc). If this is the case, you as the sponsor must be prepared to dig deep for the real reasons for this. You will also need to hammer home the need to stick to deadlines. You should also communicate that 100% knowledge is impossible, and that you trust the team to come up with good conclusions and recommendations in the time that they have been given (and have agreed). In this case, you will also need to help the team prioritize its activities going forward in order to get back on plan. My final recommendation is to keep a close eye on the team going forward. This is based on my experience that once a team has shown an inclination not to meet deadlines, it is likely to do so again.

Follow the links if you are interested in more information on project planning or project management training.

How to Ensure That Key Stakeholders Are Sufficiently Aware of the Project

In a recent post I outlined eight signs that are leading indicators for a project that can be expected not to reach its goals and targets in a timely manner. This post will highlight how best to deal with the sixth of these signs, a project where key stakeholders are not aware of the project.

Why is this a problem? This is a problem because input from stakeholders is required both for increasing the overall quality of the project results and for getting key recommendations implemented. Stakeholders can be defined as the people within the organization who are interested in the results of the project because they can be impacted by the conclusions and recommendations coming out of the project. Key stakeholders can include managers from specific organizational units (marketing, production, etc), but also unions (in the case of cost-reduction projects).

If the project team has not had any (or only very limited) contacts with key stakeholders it is very unlikely that all key issues that are important to these stakeholders have been included in the overall project analytics. In addition, it is even more unlikely that the stakeholders will have a positive opinion about the project and the project results as they will feel left out of the process and not listened to. As a result, it will be very difficult for the project team to carry out an optimal communication process in the end phase to create the buy-in necessary for implementation. This will mean that the end-phase is likely to be difficult and unpleasant, and that the resistance to the project conclusions will be high.

In many of my projects I find that this is one of the corrective actions that need to be carried out. The best way to do this is to plan a meeting with the project team (again). The key goal of this meeting is to discuss and agree who the key stakeholders are, and what their most important issues are. Based on this, the team develops a concrete plan to sit down with each (type of) stakeholder. In these stakeholder meetings the team should present the project (what are the key starting points, the issues that the project is dealing with, the overall goal, the key deliverables, and the approach) and what the team believes the potential interests of the stakeholder are.

Usually, I need to explain to the team that they must listen very carefully to what the stakeholder has to say. Key points that need to be understood by the team include what the stakeholders sees as the key issues, and how they believe that these issues should be dealt with. I highlight that it is important that the project team does not make any promises (explicit or implicit) regarding how the issues will be dealt with as this will seriously compromise the ability of the team to come up with the optimal answer. Rather, the key goal is that the team knows what the viewpoints of the stakeholder are, and that the stakeholder feels that he has been listened to.

Together with the sponsor, I typically plan a new meeting with the project team after they have seen the key stakeholders. In this meeting we discuss the viewpoints presented by the stakeholders, and agree what the team needs to do in order to ensure that these issues are dealt with in an optimal manner. In addition, an ongoing set of meetings is planned with key stakeholders. The emphasis of these meetings will gradually change from getting information to presenting and testing key hypotheses and possible conclusions and recommendations.

Follow the links if you are interested in more information on project planning or project management training.

Ensuring That the Project Team Has Sufficient Interaction With Sponsors

In a recent post I outlined eight signs that are leading indicators for a project that can be expected not to reach its goals and targets in a timely manner. This post will highlight how best to deal with the fifth of these signs, a project a team that has very limited interaction with sponsors.

Why is this a problem? This is a leading indicator for problems because it means that the project team is not using a key resource for advancing the project. The project team should be using the sponsors to a) check that that the project is heading in the right direction and to get guidance on key issues, b) to get information about key environmental changes that can have an impact on the project, c) to use the sponsors to help deal with logistical issues (getting into the agenda of key information sources, getting additional resources and/or data, etc), and d) to pre-communicate and test key findings and possible conclusions / recommendations.

If the team is choosing not to use this resource, delays are very probable (as limited time is likely to be the reason that the project team is not seeing the sponsors), and, most importantly, quality of the project results will suffer. Lower quality will primarily be a consequence of not having given the sponsors the opportunity to provide corrective input if the team is going in a wrong direction (due either to wrong assumptions or changes in business environment). In addition, timing and deadlines are likely to suffer due to the project team not using the sponsors pro-actively for logistical issues. Finally, getting overall acceptance for key recommendations is likely to be more difficult if the project team has not pre-communicated initial ideas and preliminary conclusions to important sponsors.

What do I do when I see this problem? A key complexity in this situation is that it is very likely that the main sponsor is part of the problem. The first part of my solution therefore involves a discussion with the sponsor where I ask a series of questions. Does the team understand that you want to be involved? Have you made time available for the team when they have requested this, or have you cancelled the last three meetings?

If the sponsor agrees that he/she is part of the problem, then he/she will need to make a special effort to help get the team back on track. My advice to the sponsor is usually to call in the team for a meeting, and set a clear agenda for the meeting. The agenda should cover issues such as overall progress, key issues the team is facing, logistical road-blocks, initial ideas and theories, etc. The meeting should end with an agreement to meet again in the near future, and an agreed plan to meet the other project sponsors. Typically, I need to explain to the sponsor that he/she will to help the team set up these meetings. My experience with getting the sponsor more involved is that the team is very happy with this input, and that it often is possible to get the project back on track fairly quickly.

Follow the links if you are interested in more information on project planning or project management training.

Helping a Team Carry Out Meaningful Analytics

In a recent post I outlined eight signs that are leading indicators for a project that can be expected not to reach its goals and targets in a timely manner. This post will highlight how best to deal with the fourth of these signs, a project a team that does not appear to be doing any meaningful analytics.

Why is this a problem? There are two main reasons why this should worry you. The first is that it is extremely difficult to conceive of a complex and important project that does not require any analytical activities to arrive at the required conclusions (if the answer was easy, it would not require a project). Therefore, if the team is not carrying out these types of activities, you and the other stakeholders are very unlikely to get the conclusions and recommendations you require. In the best case, you are likely to get a "data-dump" and a set of options to choose between.

The other reason why this is a worrying symptom is what you tend to see such teams doing instead of analytics. What I have often seen is that such teams seem to be working hard, but are spending their time carrying out a large number of interviews, collecting as much data and information as they can lay their hands on, and, often, doing a lot of travel. The consequences of these activities are that project costs are too high, and that it is very unlikely that the key project milestones will be met.

Why do project teams typically not carry out the required analytical tasks? In many of the situations where I am asked to help this is caused by the team having an unclear picture of what is required from them, and therefore thinking that preparing a "data-dump" is the goal of the project. In other companies I see project-teams that are unable to carry out the required analytical tasks. While analytics is second nature to many people (consultants, etc), there are many capable and smart people who are not good at structuring and analyzing (new) problems. Finally, I also often see teams that are unwilling to go beyond data-collection as they are uncomfortable with the possible conclusions and are not willing to deliver unpopular recommendations.

What can you do to help the project team carry out the required analytics? My first step in helping teams with this problem is to recheck the project plan to understand how much analytics are required. The next step I carry out is to sit down with the project team to understand why they are still in the data-collection phase. The next steps will depend on the answers given by the team. In situations where they do not understand that they are required to do the analytics, I ensure that the team understands the true goals of the project and how the required deliverables depend on analytics. This set of actions will also help to push the team that is unwilling to go beyond data-collection to come up with uncomfortable and/or unpopular conclusions. In this situation I find that it helps to explain to the team why they (as individuals) have been asked to carry out this project.

In the cases where the missing analytics is due to inability, then the team composition is wrong, and together with the sponsor I consider what we can do about this. One solution is to add analytical capacity to the team, but the responsibilities of such a person has to be carefully defined in order to avoid team-development issues. The second solution will be to push the team to do their best, possibly combined with a workshop on specific analytical techniques (spreadsheets, statistics, etc). This is the best solution if keeping to deadlines is more important than optimal quality.

Using the process described above, I was able to help/force the team at the utility company to develop overall conclusions and meet the final agreed deadlines. Follow the links if you are interested in more information on project planning or project management training.

Dealing With a Project Team That is Carrying Out Too Many Interviews

In a recent post I outlined eight signs that are leading indicators for a project that can be expected not to reach its goals and targets in a timely manner. This post will highlight how best to deal with the third of these signs, a project team is spending a lot of time carrying out "interviews".

Why is this a problem? This does not have to be a problem, as there are projects that require collecting information from a wide range of people (internal and external) in the form of interviews. However, I have often seen this becoming a problem, because it often is a symptom of a team that is avoiding getting to the conclusion phase of the project. An example of this is a project I carried out for a large utility, where a project team had missed numerous deadlines, and always with the reason that they needed to carry out more interviews. After talking to the team members, it was clear that they were very uncomfortable with the overall goals of the project and the recommendations that they need to deliver (i.e. improving the effectiveness of a process and being able to do things with less people and costs). In addition, the team had to choose where to situate certain activities. This put the team in a very difficult political situation, and it was unable to "bite the bullet" and make the required choice that would, by definition, make some people unhappy.
If this type of situation is left unchecked, it is almost guaranteed that the project team will not make its milestones and key deadlines. In fact, the most likely reason that you as a project sponsor are reading this blog-post is that the a team carrying out a crucial project has already missed deadlines. In addition, the chance that the project team will come up with meaningful conclusions and recommendations is also fairly small as fear related to this is what is driving the excessive interviews.
What can you do if you believe that one of your teams is using this tactic to avoid moving towards meaningful conclusions? The first action you need to take is to check the original project-plan to sanity-check whether the number of interviews being carried out makes sense. If you are still uncomfortable, you then need to talk to the team about why they are doing all the interviews. In this process you should force the team to show you the goal of each meeting/interview that has been carried out and those that are still in the planning phase.
If you at this stage still have doubts about the validity of the interviews, you will need to revisit the background and goals of the project and reinforce the requirement to the team to come up with strong, focused, and structured conclusions and recommendations. You will also need to explain to the team that meeting agreed deadlines is a key part of the commitment that they have made to the overall project. You will also probably need to give the team a "level of comfort" that they will never be able to collect 100% of the data and information that they theoretically would like to have, and that you (and the rest of the stakeholders) trust them to do well with the time and resources that they have.
Finally, it is likely that you will need to help the team to develop a structured plan for carrying out the interviews and other data-gathering activities that you have agreed are required within the available time. It will need to be a judgment call from your side whether it is possible and/or required to give the team more time to carry out these activities. The final recommendation to you as the sponsor is to closely follow-up on the team as they move forward, as it is unlikely that their wish to avoid unpleasant conclusions and recommendations has disappeared.

Using the process described above, I was able to help/force the team at the utility company to develop overall conclusions and meet the final agreed deadlines. Follow the links if you are interested in more information on project planning or project management training.

Dealing With a Project Team That is Not Spending Enough Time Together

In a recent post I outlined eight signs that are leading indicators for a project that can be expected not to reach its goals and targets in a timely manner. This post will highlight how best to deal with the second of these signs, a project team that does not seem to be not spending much time together.

Why is this a problem? A complex project will (almost by definition) require input from different parts of the organization. It will also almost always require a combination of different experience, knowledge, and abilities in order to successfully meet its goals. While there are certainly project-related activities that need to be done on an individual basis, there is a great deal of work that needs to be done jointly by the team.

In my experience, the first, and maybe most crucial, of these activities is getting real agreement on the goals and deliverables of the project, and the translation of this into activities (Other crucial success factors for starting up a complex project are described in another blog-post). This common and joint starting point can only be achieved by spending time together, and is crucial for ensuring that all team members are doing the right things. Another activity that must be carried out jointly is the interpretation of the outcomes of analytical activities (see blog-post on how to get a team to carry out meaningful analytics). While the initial analysis can be done by one member of the team, real quality is added by using the experience and knowledge of the rest of the team. Spending time together for this type of activities is also crucial for ensuring that the rest of the team understand and agree the outcome of specific activities in order to optimally carry out their own pieces of work.

A complex project typically also requires a high degree of coordination between activities. This can sometimes be done face-to-face between two team-members, but broader coordination is often required to ensure that all activities are optimally linked to each other. A typical example of such coordination comes from a recent project where I helped a team develop a business plan. In this project two crucial activities were developing a spreadsheet model and collecting data and developing assumptions for filling the model. One of the major challenges this team had was ensuring that these two activities were aligned regarding type of data and the format of the data to be collected. An additional complexity was that the requirements of the model were changing over time as additional insights were developed. This alignment was done partly in team meetings, and partly in face-to-face meetings between the modeler and the individual team members.

Finally, the development of the overall conclusions and recommendations from the project will require closely working together, as it will be based on analysis and interpretation coming from all the activities carried out by the team. This is crucial not only for the quality of the results, but also for developing the required consensus view on the conclusions (especially if the project is political in its nature and the team members represent different factions within the organization).

Why do project teams not spend sufficient time together? Sometimes I see that it is because they do not understand the need for working together. Often this is combined with a feeling that they do not have sufficient time to spend together, and need to focus on "doing the work". Other times, the team members do not feel comfortable working together. This is especially the case if the project is political in nature.

What can be done to help the team spend sufficient time together? The first step I typically carry out is to sit down with the team to understand why they do not get together more often. Typical answers I l get are that there is limited need and that they do not have the time to spend together. In this case, I make a strong case for why time together is required (using the arguments given earlier). If "time" truly is a key factor, then I have had to ensure that the team members are able to free up sufficient time from their day-to-day activities to give the required attention to all aspects of the project work. This has usually required the assistance of the project sponsor. Finally, I have forced the team to set appointments for getting together (including agreeing an agenda for what will be discussed). In these cases, it has also helped if the sponsor has taken time to sit in on one or two meetings to help the team to work effectively together.

Follow the links if you are interested in more information on project planning or project management training.

Helping a Project That is Dealing With a Very Broad Range of Issues

In a recent post I outlined eight signs that are leading indicators for a project that can be expected not to reach its goals and targets in a timely manner. Many of you have requested more details on the individual issues. In this post, the focus lies on how to deal with a project team that is dealing with a very broad range of issues.

Why is this a problem? In my experience, projects that are not dealing with a relatively narrow range of issues have great difficulties in keeping focused and have problems in knowing precisely which activities are required for reaching the agreed goals. In addition, they tend to spend a very large amount of time communicating with potential stake-holders. The main consequence of this is that it is almost guaranteed that these projects will not be able to keep to the agreed timelines and meet key deadlines. In addition, due to the broad range of issues, they will have great difficulties in developing crisp and concrete conclusions and recommendations, thereby not delivering value related to any of the issues the project set out to deal with.

My recommendation to clients is to start every project with a crisp and focused set of objectives. If you have different, but related, issues, you should strongly consider setting up specific projects to deal with each issue (either in parallel of sequentially). If the problem itself is difficult to structure, consider setting up a phased approach where the goal of the first phase is to develop a better understanding of the situation, to suggest the possible ways that the issues can be dealt with, and to give advice on how a project should optimally be set up.

What can you do if you believe that you have a project in your portfolio that is dealing with too broad a range of issues? My recommendation is to sit down with the project team and go back to the starting point for the project. Key questions that need to be answered include a) what has changed in the business environment that the project needs to develop a response to, b) what are the key issues that the project needs to deal with, and c) how well do we understand these issues?

Based on the answers to these questions, I have helped many teams to develop an overall goal and a set of concrete deliverables for the project. The goals that we have agreed have been measurable and the deliverables have represented something that clearly did not exist earlier (a marketing plan, a new process, etc). The concrete goal and agreed deliverables have then been used as a starting point for analyzing the activities being carried out by the project team. Any activities that are not absolutely required for meeting the concrete goal should be stopped immediately. If they are important for reaching other goals, they should be given to a separate team. Based on the new set of activities, a new and realistic plan has been agreed with the team, and the team has set to work again with a renewed focus and increased energy. Typically, the process of getting the team focused has taken two or three meetings in a course of a week.

Follow the links if you are interested in more information on project planning or project management training.