Are you an unbeliever?

I was asked a very unique question by one of the learners in a project management course I taught this week: “How do I motivate my team members when even I don’t believe in the project?“.

While I’d been posed this question for the first time, it is not an uncommon challenge. It is hard enough for project managers who are in full support of their projects to inspire disengaged team members so having to do so when the project managers themselves don’t feel the projects are worth doing is much worse.

Start by confirming the issue does not rest with you. Are you experiencing some general malaise with the company, your role, or some other personal cause which has nothing to do with the project? If so, deal with that first, or recuse yourself if you have the option to do so until you can deal with your personal issues.

Assuming the challenge is with the project and not you, how do you go about addressing this?

You can’t just grin and bear it. If you don’t really believe in the benefits from the project, it will be hard for you to create a genuine sense of purpose for your team members. Worse, if you try to fake it, your team members will pick up on this and you will lose credibility with them which will hurt you much more if you have to work with them on future projects.

Make sure you understand the underlying business rationale for the project. Whether there is a financial motive or not to the project’s existence, is there something you are missing with regards to its expected benefits? If you have a good relationship with sponsoring stakeholders, meet with them to ensure you have the full picture. Ask your peers if they can see something which you don’t.

If it is a non-discretionary project, ask yourself why you don’t believe it needs to be done? We always want to lead disruptive, innovative, sexy projects but just because you are working on a mandatory project doesn’t mean that your team members can’t express their creativity, especially in coming up with lean solutions to the minimal requirements. With such projects it is often a question of re-framing how you perceive them. By keeping your organization safe, you are improving its brand, reducing risk and opportunity costs.

What if it is a discretionary project? Even if it is not improving profitability or solving world hunger, is there any benefit which justifies the investment? Even if the answer is “no”, could there be an intangible reason for it such as a promise made to a critical stakeholder which, if broken, would cost a lot more to address in the future? If so, why wouldn’t you want to support it?

But sometimes the project you are leading truly has no merit. If so, this is the time to use your powers of influence and persuasion to convince the sponsor, governance committees and other decision makers to do the right thing. And if they don’t, you have a tough personal decision to make.

If you are asked to lead a project and don’t want to, always start with why.

 

 

COVID-19 and agile are strange bed fellows

COVID-19 is like that car accident just up ahead which you know you shouldn’t be focusing on while driving, but which draws the attention of all around it. After doing a number of articles related to the pandemic, I’d planned to write about something completely different, but as my weekly blogging time drew near I realized that there was (at least) one more topic I needed to write about.

I’ve often said that one of the bigger challenges with agile transformations is the costs of doing nothing (different) today is cheaper than those of changing things so that they will be much better a year or two down the line. This is especially true when you look at companies which operate in markets which are near monopolies or oligopolies as they might still succeed in spite of themselves. Implementing transformations such companies can be orders of magnitude more difficult than in those companies who need to always be more efficient and effective than their competitors in order to survive.

But all that has changed.

Operating budgets have been slashed, companies have frozen hiring, supply chains are under such heavy demand that materials may be unavailable when needed and staff availability is even more unpredictable. Regulations are being introduced at lightning speed, fast-tracking public policy changes in hours or days which normally would take months to push through.

And worse, don’t expect a quick resolution.

Under such conditions, it is not enough to just deliver business value from your projects as early and regularly as possible, avoiding non-value add efforts and inspecting and adapting based on changes within and without.

Portfolio investment decisions will also need to be made in a similar manner. Funding plans might need to focus on shorter time horizons and provide Plan B (and C and D) options of what could be delivered with progressively greater constraints on investment.

Defining right-sized MVPs, MBIs and MMRs will be critical.

Product and solution viability risks will have to be explored much earlier than they might have been previously.

Understanding our cross-functional value streams and finding ways to reduce the cost of delay across them will be that much more critical.

And teams will have to take an enterprise-level view, making sure they are engaging delivery and control stakeholders appropriately so that business and control objectives are both being met.

And above all, we need to double-down on putting people first. 

 

 

 

 

What’s blocking your benefits realization?

PMI just released the Benefits Realization Management practice guide this month which provides comprehensive but still easily consumable coverage of a benefits management framework covering principles, practices and roles. There is no doubt that benefits management is a critical competency for any company whether they are for profit or not-for-profit but it is also not well  implemented in many organizations.

Overly optimistic business cases might be one reason for this as I’d covered in an earlier article, but there are other potential causes including:

• An unwillingness to hold sponsors accountable for expected benefits. While punitive measures may create a culture of fear and drive otherwise effective sponsors away but there still needs to be some way of ensuring that sufficient due diligence has gone into identifying benefits. Independent verification of benefits analysis is one way to reduce inflated expected outcomes without scaring off potential sponsors.
• A lack of objective definition of the benefits expected to be realized when executing a given investment. Even for initiatives with a financial benefits motive, it may be difficult to demonstrate causality between the outputs of the project and expected financial outcomes as there will usually be more multiple projects with the same types of measures (e.g. increase revenue, reduce costs).
• Limited monitoring of expected benefits over the life of an investment. Projected benefits like scope, schedule and cost baselines represent what is expected at the point in time when they were defined so ongoing forecasting is crucial. Without this, delivery might be successful within approved scope, schedule and cost constraints, but the project’s ROI is never realized. Sometimes there is no owner identified for tracking benefits during the life of the project while other times an owner has been anointed but is ineffective in that role or is unwilling to declare that the project won’t deliver expected benefits proactively.
• Benefits realization timelines are excessively long. The more time which passes between the end of a project and when expected benefits should materialize, the more fragile those benefits will be due to the impacts of internal and external changes.
• Poor project delivery. While the outcomes of a given project may not change, if the costs or timeline for realizing those increase significantly due to delivery issues, the project’s ROI will be worse than expected.

For leaders looking to improve benefit realization from their project investments, doing some root cause analysis to identify why projects aren’t generating expected benefits can help them to focus their improvement efforts.

Mohamed El-Erian – “Investors have to ask themselves two questions. How much can we grow our investments? And, can we afford our mistakes?”