The Red Pill Executive. Tony Gruebl
identify.
You won’t find the answer to the Business Value equation on a dashboard because some elements are subjective. Some elements are hanging in the air after a meeting’s over. Some are in the movements of people in and around your organization. Despite the best intentions of those involved or the level of PMO maturity, the culture of your company and the biases of its constituents heavily influence whether an endeavor comes out as a win or a loss.
To get an accurate evaluation, the executive in charge must first find clarity as to whether the objective is worth the cost. When the Business Value is high enough, sometimes it’s okay to blow the time-cost-scope triangle on purpose. That’s when the Iron Triangle becomes a constructive tool.
Sometimes, project failure can be an advantage. The highest order of business for an Operations Executive is to quickly kill a detrimental project before it funnels resources, time, money, and focus away from other activities that have more Business Value potential. Saving time and money before it’s wasted constitutes a win for the organization. Sometimes this is a massive win, depending on how much time and money you are about to squander on something that makes no sense. Imagine how much money and time could be saved by canceling a medium-sized IT project, for instance.
“Sometimes, project failure can be an advantage.”
When does an otherwise good project make no sense? When the Business Value doesn’t merit the amount of time, money, and focus required to complete it. That comes down to Strategic Alignment. If the project is in Strategic Alignment with the purpose of the organization and its short-and long-term goals, then it is worth doing—as long as the Operations Executive has an accurate read on the Business Value potential.
If the project is not in Strategic Alignment, then it should be left on the white board. The same is true at any point during execution. If at any time the initiative veers out of Strategic Alignment, stop immediately. That’s the back lot, bare knuckle approach we’ve been talking about. We know when to slam on the brakes, and we’re not afraid to do it. We’ve saved our clients millions, and that’s money already in the bank.
Measuring Strategic Alignment
To show how Strategic Alignment can be subjective at times, we thought back to a client we recently worked with on two significant initiatives. These projects were of such high importance that the board of directors of the company asked the president to take the lead as the executive sponsor.
Certainly, with the approval of the board and the president, the initiative was in Strategic Alignment and worth pursuing. Since it supported one of the highest priorities of the business, as stated by the board, it even warranted the cost for outsourced project consultants.
The team conducted its Rapid Control Process (explained in Chapter 6: The Currency of Effectiveness), created a plan, hardened that plan, documented risks, built risk mitigating steps into the plan, created a budget, snaked the documents to the constituents, and kicked off the work. Five weeks into the six-month project, the company dismantled the project, and the manager received new assignments. Those big objectives didn’t happen.
Money went out, but not a single person was in trouble.
When we asked the firm’s president, “Was this initiative a win or loss for the company?” his response was, “We learned a lot…”
“The company spends money to learn what doesn’t work. We call it the school of hard knocks.”
The project as a whole dissolved, but some of the work continued in a modified way as part of regular operations. They all got a little smarter.
The stated strategic objective of the project didn’t happen. The project landed in File 13, and the firm saved money. The only tangible win: learning.
Next time, the company will do things differently, not because the project failed, but because the approach failed. They learned that their approach could not accomplish their strategic mission.
This happens a lot.
The company spends money to learn what doesn’t work. We call it the school of hard knocks.
Sometimes, it’s necessary to spend money, time, effort, and focus to get more fidelity in the true value potential, but even then, we have no idea how the project will fare. This happens all the time in organizations all over the world.
In a story delivered yearly by a college professor, a young, newly minted department head hired an expensive consultant who promised to make the department more efficient, saving the company money. Unfortunately, the consultant failed. The investment was not recovered. The young department manager brought her printed resignation to her divisional vice president, confessing that she had lost the department a lot of money. The VP laughed and threw the document into the trash. “Resign?!?” he boomed. “How dare you offer to resign after we just invested so much to train you to make better decisions? Now get back to work.”
“Too often, the project succeeds, but it fails against the bigger mission of the business.”
How do you measure a project’s performance at this level? It’s a business case. Sometimes it’s an easy case to make – upgrading to a new CRM allowed us to track our customer preferences better, allowing the sales group to achieve their strategic goal of 20% growth and increase market share.
Other times, the business case is less compelling, murkier, or with negative outcomes – we learned a great deal, we won’t make that mistake again, and it cost us less to learn than we otherwise could have spent. We’ll take that as a win.
Failing in Strategic Alignment is the same way. If we opted for an unnecessary and expensive system upgrade as a growth measure when the business strategy was to invest in other, higher margin areas of the business, failure to remain in Strategic Alignment is clear. However, if we made that investment in system upgrades because our strategy was poorly constructed or terribly communicated, fidelity in the true value potential is absent, and people feel confused about whether it was a win or a loss.
Too often, the project succeeds, but it fails against the bigger mission of the business. To keep the project in Strategic Alignment, the Operations Executive and other relevant senior executives should attend project briefings to explore the true value potential and bring fidelity to the discussion.
That takes us into a company meeting, face to face with the most subjective and difficult factor to measure and manage: human behavior.
The Human Element
Once a project has enough merit to get off the white board, another factor rises to the surface: the human element. We come across the human element in every conversation, every interaction, every plan, and every meeting. It’s about motivation and positioning. Sometimes we call it bias. Sometimes we call it perspective. Sometimes it’s called WIIFM—What’s In It For Me.
Strategy, tactics, and objectives are subject to “the humans”40 and what they don’t say out loud. Human bias impacts the measurement of project success at every level. Perhaps that’s why the Triple Constraints became the standard. Measuring human perspective is hard to do.
Biases show up in different forms at different levels. Executive bias is different than departmental bias. For example, PMO leaders could be biased to measure process adherence. Project teams could be biased toward avoidance of backtracking.
A hypothetical project team might be biased to smooth operations. Supporting that bias, the corporate culture rewards predictability over speed. So, when the PMO measures the satisfaction of the team at the end of the project, the scores come back low because the team had to move uncomfortably fast. When the PMO weighs the opinion of the team members equally with Strategic Alignment, the entire report tilts off center.
Meantime, the hypothetical Operations Executive was motivated to move at maximum speed in this project because his promotion depends