Management's role in project failure

Citation

(2001), "Management's role in project failure", Journal of Management Development, Vol. 20 No. 10. https://doi.org/10.1108/jmd.2001.02620jac.001

Management's role in project failure

Management's role in project failure

Rather than blaming the project manager, senior management should look to its own role when projects fail. This was a major theme that emerged from the 15th IPMA World Congress. This short piece picks through a number of papers presented at the conference for some of the reasons they give for project failure. All too often, it seems, senior management only has itself to blame!

What goes wrong?

Figures collected by the UK's Industrial Society in the early1990s, show that some 77 per cent of projects in the UK fail, while the US figure, 83 per cent, is even worse. For specific sectors the statistics are particularly bad: it appears that only 7 per cent of business process redesign projects and just 3 per cent of IT projects succeed. The Industrial Society quotes the following reasons for project failure:

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  inadequate definition;

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  poor or no planning;

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  wrong leader;

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  scope not defined;

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  inappropriate team;

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  ineffective controls;

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  poor communication;

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  unrealistic timescale.

They also point out that 80 per cent of UK companies whose projects failed had no project management infrastructure. In the USA, the Business Round Table highlights poor definition of project scope as the primary cause of cost over-runs, followed by the loss of control during design and execution.

Management issues

Garth Ward, a consultant lecturer at Cranfield School of Management, in the UK, points out that while much of the project management literature defines critical success factors, and even identifies the causes of project success or failure, it still does not satisfactorily explain the reasons behind these causes. Many, in his view, can be laid at management's door. For instance:

Imprecision

Business decisions are often based on predictions about the marketplace, or some other facet of the business environment, that are difficult to substantiate. Yet business managers often fail to recognise that to proceed, a project manager has to have information that is firm, accurate and can be structured in considerable detail. As a result, misunderstandings between the managers of the business and the managers responsible for the projects they initiate can arise right from the start.

Massaged business cases

Generally speaking, projects do not start until the business case has been approved. Yet promoters of projects are frequently optimistic in their assessments and massage the business case to make sure the project goes ahead. By the time the project manager is appointed, it is too late to challenge these underlying premises.

Scope and costs

Typically, project sponsors find it difficult to visualise all that is involved until their business concept is turned into a specific project brief. The result is often a mismatch between budget expectations and proposed project costs. What ensues may be called a cost reduction exercise, but what actually happens is a significant change to the project's scope or specification to save money. Unfortunately, people involved in the project often connive in this process because they want the project to go ahead.

However, once management's budget requirements have been met, the project users, who have different priorities and no financial responsibility for the project, push for revisions and project redefinitions to get back what they wanted in the first place. Thus the seeds for future failure are sown.

Ways of thinking

Ward warns of a management assumption that creative innovation and project management are comfortable bedfellows. Creative people are divergent thinkers and, as such, tend to explore and expand a problem – developing considerable knowledge of the subject but not necessarily getting any closer to a solution. Project execution, however, requires a convergent approach, cutting through inessentials to find acceptable solutions to project problems. Nobody, in his view, can be creatively innovative and manage projects simultaneously.

Planning or doing

Ward quotes Sir John Harvey Jones, past chairman of ICI, who said: "People don't like to plan. It's much more fun just to do, and the nice thing about just doing, is that failure comes as a complete surprise. Whereas, if you have planned, failure is preceded by a long period of despondency and worry." Research shows that time spent planning improves project outcomes; yet senior managers – who have a predeliction for "creating strategies and visions and other glamorous stuff" – usually push to "make it happen" quickly. This means that the essential planning phase is often seriously foreshortened.

Functional silos

Many senior management project sponsors remain trapped in their functional discipline, unable to think in terms of an integrative multidisciplinary process. They only think in terms of an end result and fail to recognise that they are in fact "portfolio project managers" managing limited resources over a number of different projects or initiatives. As a result, they fail to prioritise – usually only doing so when it's too late, and even then their prioritisation means that favourite, rather than worthy, projects get the necessary resources.

Methodologies

All too often, project management methodologies are brought into an organisation in an endeavour to find instant solutions. But such methodologies rarely fit the unique and changing circumstances within any particular organisation. Ward warns that "a methodology is no substitute for thinking or managing", and what organisations need are project managers with the right attitude – not simply systems and procedures.

Planning issues

Burnaby Lautier, of the Organisation for Project Management, at Naarden, in The Netherlands, argues that being able to execute a project according to plan is the exception rather than the rule. Echoing Garth Ward's concerns about methodologies, Lautier regrets that "there are many in our profession [project management] in quest of the ultimate planning system that will end change-of-plans once and for all and allow us to execute a project on time by just applying a method or a set of tricks". In his view, "these persons are very unlikely to succeed".

Lautier believes that the best that a plan can do is give a firm a starting point for later changes. In fact, contrary to many managers' expectations, good plans change frequently.

Things that go wrong include:

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  Plans are often made on the assumption of unlimited resources and then remain uncorrected even when actual availability is known. This leads to unrealistic expectations about finishing dates.

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  Management can be careless about overloading available resources – in Lautier's view, if resources are overloaded by 10 per cent, you can expect a 20 per cent delay.

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  The use of over-sophisticated tools means plans get too big and too detailed. Procedures and documents tend to slow everything down and eat up attention, so they should be limited to the bare essentials.

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  Financial controls concentrate on cost, not time. Putting up financial obstacles that make spending the money allocated to the project difficult only creates delays that frequently cost much more than the immediate amount of money involved. Once a decision is made to execute a project, it should be possible to spend the project budget without further difficulty.

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  Many project control procedures compare progress to date against the plan, even though this is the past and cannot be changed. It is much more rewarding to look forward and try to spot forthcoming difficulties that can be avoided by minor corrections ahead of time.

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  In rapidly changing environments, plans can quickly lose touch with reality and, when this happens, the project manager has to improvise. Yet management still wants progress reported according to the plan.

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  Decision making is limited to predetermined decision points. As a result, a lot of time and resources are wasted on projects that should have been killed or changed much earlier (see below).

Decision points

Lautier argues that, contrary to their intended purpose, management decision points are more likely to increase risk than to reduce it. Designed to be the point at which decisions are made about whether a project should continue, outside these predetermined points the project proceeds at full-speed. In his view:

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  Decisions can, and should, be made anywhere in the project and at any time. By inserting a decision point, decision making becomes artificially restricted to particular moments in time.

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  At decision points the project is stopped until it is allowed to continue. Yet decision making is an activity that consumes time – often quite a lot of it. As a result, the project team sits idle or, worse, gets involved in other projects.

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  Important decisions are necessary when something has happened which requires the project to be reconsidered. There is, in Lautier's view, no reason at all to wait for a decision point to come up. Indeed, because disasters and problems arise randomly, important decisions will very rarely coincide with a decision point.

So decision points actually create imaginary safety, waste valuable time and mean that those responsible take decisions sporadically, "without ever seriously considering the consequences of the complete project".

People problems

Ray de Winter, principal consultant with Cornwell Affiliates, in the UK, warns that, to succeed, a project "must have more than just the passive goodwill of sponsors, managers, affected parties and others. It needs all parties to want it to succeed and to be prepared to take action to see that it does".

De Winter points out that there is usually a spectrum of attitudes, within any organisation, toward any particular project and he characterises five types of people:

1. 1.

   The overt saboteur can be readily identified because he or she makes no secret of their intentions. They argue forcefully against a project – even after it has been approved – and use project boards or steering groups to limit the scope of a project or change its direction.

2. 2.

   Passive resisters are trickier to spot because, rather than raise any specific objection to the project going ahead, they will continually sidetrack decisions by raising red herrings and try to derail the project by quietly undermining the arrangements and actions needed to make progress.

3. 3.

   The non-committed will watch from the sidelines, being neither helpful nor unhelpful. Supporting the party line on public occasions, they bide their time before deciding which way to jump. If pressed for support, their own priorities and interests will come first. As de Winter points out. "If there are 'overt saboteurs' or known 'passive resisters' among the senior management of an enterprise, that fact itself is likely to increase the number of 'non-committeds'."

4. 4.

   The well-wisher, while supporting the project and its aims, is too preoccupied with his or her own problems. They are unlikely to volunteer help because the project is low in their priorities, but will often lend a hand – reactively – when asked.

5. 5.

   The fully committed are prepared to put themselves out to make the project a success. They take a keen interest in it, demanding progress reports and volunteering to contribute in ways that enhance the project's chance of success.

Any failure to identify, and then neutralise, the overt saboteurs or passive resisters will place any project in serious jeopardy. Undue reliance on the non-committed and well-wishers is also likely to prove misplaced and be potentially dangerous. Unfortunately, even the fully committed can prove difficult, if they dabble too much or involve themselves in ways that divert attention from the project's progress. Being fired up with enthusiasm, they can become so involved on a day-to-day basis that commitment can turn into interference.

Falling into bad habits

Rudolf Burkhard, senior consultant at Dupont Consulting Systems, Switzerland, argues that good people are often pushed into bad habits by the way management manages things.

Why, he wonders, do so few tasks get completed early? One answer is that if anyone starts delivering early, management will respond in the same way as they do with budget underspends – you'll get less time (or money) next time.

Another reason is that management by objectives requires that project milestones be put in place. These mean that the emphasis is firmly on delivering on time, rather than early. But they also cause what Burkhard describes as "student syndrome". That is, the tendency most of us have, if given enough time, to procrastinate and do other things until a deadline puts us under pressure. We wait until the last possible moment before starting work and thus significantly diminish the chance of finishing on time after Murphy's Law has struck.

Managers' love of efficiency also creates what is possibly the worst habit – multi-tasking. Efficient managers like to keep people working 100 per cent of the time. So there is no spare capacity. Yet when a new project is authorised, management invariably wants it to start immediately, even though other projects are incomplete. With everyone fully loaded with work, and the critical resource probably already overloaded, all projects start to compete for scarce resources.

The result is that resources are switched from project to project and back again, and on each occasion time is lost in setting-up to do a different piece of work. This means yet more capacity is lost and each project ends up taking much longer than it should as it waits for a resource to come back. As projects pile up, growing management pressure makes everyone multi-task even more. "So this critical team of people is wasting their capacity through multi-tasking, all in the name of efficiency." Burkhard points out that with just three projects running in parallel, the elapsed time for a project can multiply by a factor of three or four, and around 30 per cent of capacity is lost.

To emphasise what he means, Burkhard cites Israeli Aircraft Industries (IAI), a company that services aeroplanes. It found that its trouble-shooting engineers – the resource with the least capacity – averaged 50 jobs on their desk at any one time and consequently put in a great deal of overtime. Unable to readily expand this capacity constraint, because good engineers are both expensive and hard to find, IAI made sure that every engineer had no more than three jobs on their desk at any one time. The rest of the jobs were held back and only released when the old ones were finished. Within six months, lead times fell from an average of 135 days to between 25 and 30, overtime declined to zero and slightly fewer people were handling the same volume of work. IAI now routinely does the so-called "D" check on wide-bodied jets in just two weeks, while other service suppliers still quote ten to 12 weeks. For the owners of jumbo jets this eight to ten week difference in turnaround time is critical.

Perhaps it's all in the mind

Ian Cammack, a teaching fellow at Lancaster University, in the UK, suggests that the way managers think may have relevance to project success or failure. After all, as he points out, the perception that management is a science – based on analysis, rationality, linear sequencing and logic – has been instilled in successive generations of managers, both formally and informally, since the early twentieth century. Scientific management still underpins many management approaches and is particularly prevalent in the field of project management.

Arguing that the use of an analytical, logical method of management, in search of "the answer", is debatable even in standardised production environments, Cammack seriously questions its value within a project environment, "where the emphasis is upon rapid response to unique situations utilising specialised resources". Yet from the beginning, "the development of project management methodologies has been focused primarily on the ability to make it more logical, more analytical and more rational".

This technocentric approach, with its belief in linear progress, absolute truths, rational planning and the standardisation of knowledge and production, has, in his view, less to offer than an attitude that accepts the situational, provisional, contingent or temporary, and makes no claim to universality, truth, reason or stability.

Acceptance of this postmodern approach to project management would involve a shift from the logical and analytical left brain toward a more right-brained way of looking at projects, seeing them for what they are: a unique series of connections, relationships and situational compromises.

If management and project managers accepted this alternative view, they would cease to be "slaves to the system or a particular methodology of project management". They would be able to approach project challenges in the spirit of using all of the resources available to reach a successful outcome. Using the right-hand brain could mean that project managers are not only doing the job right, but that they are also doing the right job! In Cammar's view, "over-dependence upon the left brain has helped us to evolve extremely logical approaches to the management of projects but at a price. This price is that we have lost sight of the holistic view of projects and the relationships that exist within them (with the environment, stakeholders and between activities)".

Papers discussed

The papers discussed in this item are: Garth Ward, "Disconnected project management"; Burnaby Lautier, "The race toward project completion"; Raymond de Winter, "Promoting active support through influencing strategies"; Rudolf Burkhard, "Good people, bad habits"; Ian Cammack, "Project management: a right brain career for a left brain century".