So what’s in a name – the criticality of project naming can’t be minimized!

Juliet might have said “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet” but I beg to differ when we are coming up with project names.

Here are a few of the ways in which good project names can make a difference:

- Motivating and unifying a cross-functional project team that hasn’t worked together in the past and is not 100% dedicated to your project.  Ensuring that your project name is uplifting and somehow captures the essence of what benefits the organization and the team members will reap can help focus team efforts.

- Engaging stakeholders and sponsors.  It might be easy as a stakeholder to ignore pleas from the project manager of the “implement ABC system version 1.2″ but you’d think twice of doing this if the name was “reduce patient mortality due to transcription errors”…

- Supporting that “outside in”, business-focused view of projects – this is especially true for technology projects.  IT is forever blamed as being disconnected from the business and purely technology-focused and picking technology-centric project names does not help your CIO foster credibility with his or her peers at the executive level.

So what are the hallmarks of a good project name?  Here are a few suggestions:

1. It should reflect the expected benefits or business outcomes of the project.

2. It should be short – short enough that you could give the project name & a brief description in the stereotypical 30 second elevator pitch.

3. It should be positive (e.g. reduce operating costs is not as positive as increase profitability)

The acid test is to visualize yourself at a conference presenting a case study about the success of your project upon its completion – would you be proud to state its name, or would you cringe and mutter it under your breath?

Being a good leader means making hard decisions – especially when PPM/PM is concerned!

A client recently presented me with this disheartening outcome – his organization had invested significant blood, sweat & tears into helping to develop and implement a new governance model coupled with some pragmatic practices automated using a commercial solution.  The procedures had passed the “gold-plating” test and had been trimmed to the bone based on feedback from front line & management staff.  Managers had been trained on the procedures and had transferred this knowledge down to their direct reports.  Communication, coaching & training were the lifeblood of the initiative.

In spite of this diligence, almost a year after the changes were launched, process compliance and consistency had barely progressed an iota beyond time tracking (and even the quality of that data is suspect).

My client has spent a lot of soul searching to identify the root cause for this – were the procedures perhaps still too onerous?  Was the tool they purchased not the best one for their needs?  Should they have invested more effort in training & coaching?  Were there too few resources to support the operational state for the processes & policies?

As it turns out,  the greatest contributor to this situation was a lack of change commitment from the sponsors for the initiative.

Had this commitment been present it might have evidenced itself in many ways:

- Frequent, visible & vocal support for the processes & supporting tools in all staff interactions

- Insistence on compliance with established procedures from peers & reporting staff and consequences resulting from chronic non-compliance

- Dogged persistence in consulting the underlying PM information systems as the official system of record instead of continuing to use ad hoc enquiries to know “what’s going on” with projects

PPM is all about changing behaviors and the hardest behaviors to change are sometimes found at the top echelons.  Executives don’t like to be perceived as “hard nosed” with their peers or reports but this misplaced desire to be a nice person fosters mediocrity and kneecaps progress.  Once it is known that a few people are getting away with non-compliance, the magnitude of non-compliance grows.

Assuming policies & processes are flexible, fair & well automated and that staff have been appropriately trained and coached on their usage, removing the heads of a few key offenders is an unfortunate, but necessary step to reinforcing credibility in one’s leadership abilities as well as the processes one purports to support.

The lesson to be learned is not to waste money in hiring staff or tools to evangelize, support & automate PPM if you are unwilling to demand behavioral change from your organization.

The use of the term “Strategic alignment” should be banned!

A fellow speaker at a conference I was at today recommended that a IT governance approach should require hard dollar benefits for non-strategic initiatives but to be less stringent for strategic requests.  This double standard concerns me not so much for the focus on financial metrics as a primary determinant for project selection but also because it provides project sponsors or requestors with a similar “path of least resistance” to that other one I hear now and again (especially in health care): “put a regulatory spin and you’ll get it approved!”.

A good project selection process should apply a consistent set of criteria to all evaluated projects (having said this, the degree of justification or due diligence that must be presented should vary based on the scale, cost or complexity of a specific request) – if strategic alignment is a primary selection criterion, build it into the evaluation process and give it a heavier weighting!

The funny thing is that strategic alignment is very difficult to disprove – as few strategic objectives are SMART, it is easy to claim that one’s project aligns with organization strategy and the burden of evidence often lies on the side of the plaintiffs rather than the defendants.

One approach to take when introducing a new project evaluation & selection process might be:

1. Verify whether your organization does in fact have SMART strategic objectives

2. If it does, design an evaluation approach that requires any project requestor who claims strategic alignment to demonstrate specifically how their project will fully or substantially complete one of these objectives (preferably with well defined targets for key performance indicators).

3. If it does not, then define standard “value factors” that will be used to evaluate projects objectively.  The key is to pick quantitative metrics that cannot be challenged by governance committee members.  While these might vary business to business, for many they may boil down to a subset of the following:

a. Impact on profitability

b. Impact on customer retention or satisfaction scores

c. Impact on employee retention or satisfaction scores

d. Impact on market share

e. Impact on service or quality level agreements

Over time, this use of generic (but objective) criteria may act as a catalyst for your leadership to distill SMART strategic objectives.