An organization builds a culture of success when it can take a strategy, identify and prioritize the most important projects within the strategy, and consistently deliver projects on time, on budget, and within identified quality standards.
Charting success is not easy. 80% of all projects fail for three main reasons.
1. 80% of projects fail because of change.
Change renders strategies and plans irrelevant:
- technology advances,
- new regulations,
- stress on process and performance from growth,
- nimble and hungry competition eroding your market share,
- quality-control issues,
- the flight of key talent,
- the competition for new talent, and
- your organization arrogance
These are just a few shifting conditions change presents to knock your plan into irrelevance before the ink is dry. All you need is one change to knock you off course.
2. 80% of all projects fail because they lack participation.
The over whelming habit of many executives and managers is to huddle with select insiders to debate the future of their organization from their view. Once these select agree, they descend Mount Sinai with a plan and expect complete buy in. The plan delivered, they soon move on to operational needs and are only awakened after goals or targets are again missed.
Project success starts with participation of the executive (the leadership), the operational (the managers), and the functional level (the doers). We are decades into the knowledge worker and the knowledge economy, but still continue with pre-World War II methods of planning by leaders who discount employee participation and motivation as too much effort. Leadership, the verb, not the adjective or adverb, is the ability to get things accomplished through others. Plans that don’t account for participation rely on hope to deliver results.
3. 80% of all projects fail because of risk.
Risk is not only a financial tool. Risk is anything that can positively (known as opportunity) or negatively affect a project; this sounds strangely close to change. Risk is crucial to understand for executives, managers, and functional talent. To avoid plans that are dead on arrival you need everyone’s participation to identify risk and that takes flexibility, proper resource alignment, and motivated talent to participate.
It takes knowledge and ability to create and deliver a plan, but only your talent’s participation and motivation can identify change and risk and then provide a rational business case to alter or modify a plan.
Risk management is a continuous process throughout the entire life cycle of every plan and involves an effort to:
- identify industry and market risk;
- facilitate an organization strategy – what
should be
; - assess your company’s current capability to deliver your plan – to include human capital/talent management;
- diagnose your company’s capability need – to include human capital/talent management;
- assess your organization’s culture to identify gaps to achieve the strategy;
- diagnose organization capability to achieve goals;
- diagnose talent, money, and time resources needed to achieve goals;
- prioritize strategic options from new information;
- adjust plans with well-articulated business case – as necessary;
- design a plan to close resource gap;
- design a marketing plan to inspire stakeholders and align resources;
- identify risks to achieve goals;
- implement a marketing communications plan for customers and employees with milestones and performance targets;
- track progress to performance targets; and
- assess new risk
In financial management the greater the risk, the greater the expected reward or potential payoff. As we hit project and plan failures of 80% it looks like we have grown to expect project failure as acceptable risk. People don’t want to be involved with failure, perhaps that is why you have little participation. People don’t want to be involved with unnecessary risk, it is a losing game, perhaps this is why change is resisted.
How can you increase your likelihood of success: manage change with more people involved in risk.
Strategies fail because too many times we do not account for more in the planning stages: more participation, more dialogue, and more reality.
If you have any examples of integrated plans or other comments, I look forward to your thoughts and comments.
