Why don’t projects deliver what they are set up to deliver?
Opening case study: Salesforce implementation at a consumer goods company, with the aim to connect the Customer Success teams to the right data and improve resolution. The project followed a rigorous process (with Gantt charts, risk registers, standups, task management) and completed all the ‘right’ tasks on time and on budget. But resolution rate didn’t pick up as planned...
We have seen stats stating that 80% of projects fail. Our recent research and interviews with senior executives have led us to a conclusion — a lot of projects fail because teams focus on completing a process, rather than delivering business outcomes.
What’s a project again?
A project is any undertaking, carried out individually or collaboratively and possibly involving research or design, that is carefully planned to achieve a particular aim. In other words, projects should be the enablers of business outcomes.
Most projects by nature involve something new and unknown. This creates uncertainty, ambiguity and a lot of guesswork in the plans. If progress is measured purely in terms of whether work proceeds according to plan, it may lead to building something no one wants.
The two sides of a project
If we break down the project structure, we can see two sides that sometimes have very different expectations of the end goals:
- Teams focus on getting tasks done and adapting to the changing business requirements, but are not always responsible for the quality of those business decisions.
- Business sponsors are accountable for the business outcomes, but are not involved in the day-to-day projects to deliver them.
Misaligned expectations
These two sides need to be bridged to deliver business outcomes — a mechanism for business sponsors to understand how teams are tracking, whether they are going to achieve the benefits, and more importantly, how to unblock barriers so that they can deliver to their promises.
However, this process can be extremely manual and is often done inconsistently, e.g. populating different templates in PowerPoint, ad hoc emails and meetings. In fact, many organisations lack the capability and visibility to ‘interrogate’ projects from an outcome lens. This leads us back to the start of the article — teams are productive at delivering outputs that don’t lead to outcomes.
A few practical ways to improve project outcomes (not outputs)
- Set clear ownership, particularly for large programs where many functions are involved. If marketing is sponsoring the Salesforce implementation, and IT is delivering it, it needs to be clear who owns what (e.g. business outcomes, technical outcomes) and they need to work together to ensure that the end goal isn’t just integrating the systems, but to give front line teams the right customer data and training for better and faster resolution.
- Get visibility on how things are tracking whilst projects are being delivered. Task completion doesn’t really tell you whether projects are delivering outcomes. Anchoring conversations against outcomes would provide better insights for decisions, e.g. what we have achieved, what’s blocking us from moving forward, our next priorities.
- Shift the mindset around how ‘blockers’ / non-green ratings are perceived — it’s not about pointing fingers, but rather about anticipating and preventing problems before they occur. Tracking and following up on actions to close the blockers should also be rigorously applied.
- Capture validated learnings as part of discovering whether teams are on the right path. Because projects are complex, non-routine effort, capturing lessons learnt (what works / doesn’t, validated assumptions, potential watch-outs, playbooks / know-how, etc.) along the way (not just afterwards) can build a valuable knowledge asset and become the standard for settling arguments with data throughout the organisation.
About JourneyLab.io: We are building an enterprise software that gives leaders visibility and guidance on how projects deliver business outcomes. To learn more and register for free early access, please visit https://journeylab.io/early_access
