Tag Archive for: project decisions

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Whose Project is it anyway?

Actually, it’s yours. Yes, there might be a project or programme manager – and other project colleagues like business analysts or project officers – but once you are on the project team there is a collective responsibility to deliver. Whether you are a sponsor, a business stakeholder, or a team member assigned to represent your business area, you will have responsibilities as part of the project team.

However, it might not always be clear what those responsibilities are, and it is the job of the project or programme manager – and more experienced team members – to help and guide you, particularly if this is your first time on a project. Projects are a team effort and everyone has an important part to play.

Whether you join the project from the beginning or part of the way through, there will be some things that you need to know (and if you don’t get told, ask):

  • What is the purpose of the project; what problems will it solve, what are the key outputs, and what does success look like?
  • What is the project lifecycle; what are the project stages and/or phases and what are the timeframes? Are you involved all of the way through?
  • How will the project be managed on a day-to-day and week-to-week basis, e.g. project meetings, steering committees, etc.? What will your time commitment be?
  • What will you be responsible and accountable for; what activities do you need to undertake and what are your deadlines?

The activities you need to undertake might be wide-ranging – reading regulations, documenting business processes, specifying requirements or management information, providing subject matter expertise, and testing systems are all good examples. It is important that you are clear on everything that you will be involved in.

Every member of a project team should know what is expected of them, even if it takes a few weeks to make sure that the initial roles, responsibilities, and activities are all agreed upon and understood. They will also evolve as the project progresses, so the communication and clarification should never stop.

But my current role is already full-time!

Sometimes individuals are seconded to project teams on a full-time basis if the project is large enough, but more commonly project activities will be alongside your current role. That can be challenging because you will have responsibilities to your current role and to the project, both with activities that need to be done and with deadlines that need to be met. Managing both is one of the main challenges when you are working on a project.

Structure, planning, and management support (both project and line) maximise the chances of success. Once you understand the project meetings or workshops you need to attend and the activities you need to undertake, make your best estimate of how much time you need to allocate to the project. You are assessing whether you have sufficient time to meet your project responsibilities alongside the responsibilities of your day job.

If you do not believe that you sensibly can do both, then you need to discuss this as soon as possible with both your line manager and the project manager. Or maybe you feel that you don’t have the right skills and experience to fulfil the project role. Human nature and business pressure might mean that this is a difficult subject to raise, but you do not want to put either your day job or the project at risk. Perhaps the project manager can redistribute some project responsibilities to make it more manageable, or perhaps some of your day-to-day responsibilities can be backfilled. You won’t know until you ask or escalate your concerns.

For any project, you need the right project team members with the necessary skills, experience, and capacity. It is the responsibility of everyone on the project team to make sure that happens – and to be open and honest about where they can (and can’t) contribute to that.

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Turning Projects Around

We often get asked what to do if a project is stalling or failing. There is no single right answer, but there are some steps that we suggest.

We find it useful to declare a project ‘amnesty’ at the outset. All project team members and stakeholders – internal and external – need to be open and honest about every aspect of the project. This is difficult to achieve if they are concerned about negative consequences or criticism of their project performance or actions. This is not necessarily easy, particularly if there have been significant failings, but the more you can keep the focus on moving forward, the quicker you can remediate the issues.

The next step is to investigate why the project is stalling or failing. If you don’t understand what the problem is, you can’t fix it (except by luck). There are lots of different reasons why a project might run into difficulties. It might be common project problems like scope creep, resource challenges, or technical delays, or it could be factors outside of the project manager’s control such as budget cuts or strategic changes.

Once you understand the problem(s), critically assess the ongoing viability and validity of the project. Companies and sectors change; a project that made sense 18 months ago might not make sense now. We’ve written before that one of the most difficult things to do is to stop a project, particularly where you have invested time and money. Sometimes projects stall or fail because the project team and stakeholders realise that the project has no longevity before a formal decision is made to stop it.

Confirming that the project is still viable and understanding what needs to be fixed are vital steps before beginning the turnaround process, as you might decide that stopping the project is the best option.

Approaching the turnaround process

The turnaround process itself can take different forms and it depends on how much ‘turnaround’ is required. Sometimes, simply re-baselining, adding resource, or reducing the scope are sufficient to re-energise the project. Other times, you may need to take more substantial measures such as changing a supplier or installing a new project team. This short article is not going to attempt to list specific solutions – there are literally books written on this – but what is important is that you use the problem assessment that you made at the beginning to objectively identify the key issues and develop the resolutions.

Also, be conscious that any turnaround work normally takes place under significant time pressure. At the point that you begin, the project is probably already delayed, the expectation will be that it continues, and any further delay needs to be minimised. It is important to balance – and manage – the expectations of getting the project back up and running quickly (if it is still a viable project) and taking the right amount of time to both assess the problems and implement the solutions.

Last, but by no means least, is the project governance. If your project has reached a point of failure then the governance, for whatever reason, has not been as effective as it needed to be. The project governance should be investigated – and revised if necessary – as part of the turnaround process. The shape of the new governance should prevent the same issues from arising again.

Project turnaround can be complicated, business and time-critical, and can carry a significant human and financial impact. Good governance and early action minimise the risk of a project getting to this stage but does not completely remove that risk.

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