Avoid this failure by carefully researching, thinking through, and understanding the resources you will need at each stage of your project, and working them into the plan from the very beginning. Interestingly, you can have a perfect project plan, but poor management can throw a huge spanner in the works and ruin a good plan. Poor management in any of these areas can send the project spiraling towards failure.
Avoid this failure by understanding your own role as manager and actively managing your project and team. What was once a project to solve a single specific problem has now grown into a huge, multi-headed beast with no clear direction. Avoid this failure by constantly asking yourself and your team if any change is necessary to the original objective.
Avoid shiny object syndrome and stay focused on achieving your original goals. All those good ideas will still be there for the next project. About Help Become an Expert. This results orientation is important for three reasons. First, it allows project planners to test whether the activities in the overall plan will add up to the intended result and to alter the plans if need be.
Second, it produces real benefits in the short term. And finally, being able to deliver results is more rewarding and energizing for teams than plodding along through partial solutions. The focus on results also distinguishes rapid-results initiatives from pilot projects, which are used in traditionally managed initiatives only to reduce execution risk. Pilots typically are designed to test a preconceived solution, or means, such as a CRM system, and to work out implementation details before rollout.
Rapid-results initiatives, by contrast, are aimed squarely at reducing white space and integration risk. Project plans typically unfold as a series of activities represented on a timeline by horizontal bars. In this context, rapid-results initiatives are vertical. They encompass a slice of several horizontal activities, implemented in tandem in a very short time frame. This vertical orientation is key to reducing white space and integration risks in the overall effort: Only by uncovering and properly integrating any activities falling in the white space between the horizontal project streams will the team be able to deliver its miniresult.
A project plan typically represents the planned activities as horizontal bars plotted over time. Rapid-results initiatives cut across horizontal activities, focusing on a miniversion of the overall result rather than on a set of activities. Here is a simplified version of the Nicaragua project described in this article. Each vertical team depicted as a group by the vertical bar includes representatives from every horizontal team, which makes the two types of initiatives mutually reinforcing.
The vertical team establishing service contracts between technical experts and farmers drew on this work, providing the farmers with coupons they could use to buy the technical services. This, in turn, drove competition in the private sector, calling on the work that the people on the horizontal training teams were doing—which led to better services.
The team working on securing commitments between farmers and technical experts in the dry farming region, for example, had to knit together a broad set of activities. The experts needed to be trained to deliver particular services that the farmers were demanding because they had heard about new ways to increase their productivity through the information management system.
So team members had to draw on a number of the broad horizontal activities laid out in the overall project plan and integrate them into their vertical effort. As they did so, they discovered that they had to add activities missing from the original horizontal work streams.
Undeterred and spurred on by the desire to accomplish their goal, team members drove through the towns of the region announcing with loudspeakers the availability and benefits of the technical services.
Over the following 20 days, the gap to the goal was closed. How fast is fast? Rapid-results projects generally last no longer than days. But they are by no means quick fixes, which imply shoddy or short-term solutions. And while they deliver quick wins, the more important value of these initiatives is that they change the way teams approach their work.
The short time frame fosters a sense of personal challenge, ensuring that team members feel a sense of urgency right from the start that leaves no time to squander on big studies or interorganizational bickering.
In traditional horizontal work streams, the gap between current status and the goal starts out far wider, and a feeling of urgency does not build up until a short time before the day of reckoning. Yet it is precisely at that point that committed teams kick into a high-creativity mode and begin to experiment with new ideas to get results.
That kick comes right away in rapid-results initiatives. They delegate execution risk to project teams, which are responsible for staying on time and on budget, but they inadvertently leave themselves carrying the full burden of white space and integration risk. In World Bank projects, as in most complex and strategically critical efforts, these risks can be huge.
When executives assign a team responsibility for a result, however, the team is free—indeed, compelled—to find out what activities will be needed to produce the result and how those activities will fit together. This approach puts white space and integration risk onto the shoulders of the people doing the work. And in the end, they are rewarded not for performing a series of tasks but for delivering real value. Their success is correlated with benefits to the organization, which will come not only from implementing known activities but also from identifying and integrating new activities.
The milk productivity team in Nicaragua, for example, found out early on that the quantity of milk production was not the issue. The real problem was quality: Distributors were being forced to dump almost half the milk they had bought due to contamination, spoilage, and other problems. So the challenge was to produce milk acceptable to large distributors and manufacturers that complied with international quality standards.
The collaboration also identified the need for simple equipment such as a centrifuge that could test the quality of batches quickly. The quality of milk improved steadily in the initial stage of the effort. Rather than invest in refrigeration facilities, the Parmalat team member now assured of the quality of the milk suggested that the company conduct collection runs in the area daily rather than twice weekly.
Despite the obvious benefits of rapid-results initiatives, few companies should use them to replace the horizontal activities altogether. Because of their economies of scale, horizontal activities are a cost-efficient way to work.
And so it is the job of the leadership team to balance rapid-results initiatives with longer-term horizontal activities, help spread insights from team to team, and blend everything into an overall implementation strategy. In Nicaragua, the vertical teams drew members from the horizontal teams, but these people continued to work on the horizontal streams as well, and each team benefited from the work of the others. To avoid this pitfall, use standardized project performance measures and establish project baselines for schedule, effort, product, etc.
The role of earned value management EVM is important here, even in small projects. Does this sound familiar: The project has vaguely-written scope definitions; there are problems gathering user requirements; there is pressure to build before the project is adequately defined; and there is no rigorous scope management.
This is one of the classic cases of project failure waiting to happen. It may sound trite, however, project scope must be clear, concise, and unambiguous. It must be clearly and commonly understood by project stakeholders, team members, and executives alike. We recommend reviewing the project's scope with your user community to obtain complete buy-in to what the project will deliver and how the work will be done.
Obtain agreement on what is in, and out, of scope. It may be appropriate to create and use a formal change control procedure, including a change control board.
Project managers and stakeholders must be aware of project progress and challenges at every stage. Unfortunately, stakeholders are informed of critical issues at a stage when the impact on costs, timelines, and scope are significant.
Inadequate communication of project status and issues is a function of stakeholder needs and expectations not being managed appropriately. Obviously, resolving the issues takes time away from planned project activities. This issue will affect any part of the project. To avoid such problems, create a communications management plan comprised of two parts: project communications and stakeholder communications.
These activities must be initiated at project kickoff, with particular effort put into performing a stakeholder analysis to identify expectations and communication needs. The role of methodologies in delivering a successful project is often overlooked. To be sure, a variety of project management and related standardized processes are available. The choice of a methodology, whether standardized or organization-specific, is secondary to its usage and adherence during project execution.
It's vital that you enforce the chosen methodology, a task made easier by using automation and tools that incorporate project workflow into the overall project execution lifecycle. Projects do and will fail, and although perception has much to with the definition of failure, that perception is often steeped in reality.
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