iJournal

iJourneys HAS MOVED

2010-09-15T17:33:00.004+01:00

iJourneys has now moved, but you can still find all this good stuff, and also Download for FREE our Big Picture project templates, and How To Guides.

Find out how we use Big Pictures to fulfill our ambition to Get Projects Right.

Just click iJourneys.co.uk

See you there.

What is iJourneys All About?

2010-04-26T23:58:00.001+01:00

Time for a Coffee

2010-03-30T00:43:00.002+01:00

Getting the Government off the High St and Online

2010-03-21T11:12:00.010Z

The Times reveals how the government is going to give every citizen a page online from where they can access government services. (see here). To be fair despite the vitriol on these pages re government IT projects, some individual departments have made a good fist of it. The DVLA is an excellent example, it is surprising how quickly we forget the inconvenience of queuing in a Post Office with an MOT certificate, insurance and a paper form to collect a paper disc.

However what is surprising, is how long it has taken the government to wake up to this idea. Although individual departments like the DVLA and TV Licensing have really efficient sites, it is akin to going to buy a book from Amazon, then logging on with different credentials to another Amazon site to buy a DVD.

Until now there has not been sufficient reason for HMG to take services online, but now with billions of debt to fund, the prospect of reducing transaction costs by eliminating staff and offices suddenly looks attractive. To see what could be achieved look around you and think about how many insurance brokers, record shops and book shops there are on the High St now compared with ten years ago.

In ten years time the same could be true for local Inland Revenue offices, Jobcentres Plus, Post Offices, Passport Offices, Council Offices, Tourist Information Centres, Registrars of Births Marriages and Deaths, and Housing Benefit Offices. The scope for online fulfillment is overwhelming.
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However this is the rub. Successful online development is iterative, it is not big bang. Google today is not the Google that was founded with a cheque for £100,000 from Andy Bechtolsheim in 1998. HMG must resist allowing the scope of this project to balloon like the NHS National Programme for IT which ended up costing £12.5bn and failing to deliver.

Online government services have started well, and this is an opportunity to gradually bring them together and make them more customer centric. Build bit by bit and deliver often is the key. The danger will be listening to senior civil servants like Jonathan Baume, general secretary of the FDA who said in the Times article:

"You cannot underestimate a whole range of risk factors including upfront costs, data protection, identity theft and social exclusion, with many people already irritated by online transactions,”

No, but this is an idea whose time has come.

Drawing the Big Picture

2010-03-17T19:01:00.005Z

We have always called it Big Picture Facilitation, but here is a video from Grove, who are the masters and originators of using pictures to facilitate change. See what David Sibbet means by active visualisation for engagement:

Benefit Mapping Project Change Requests

2010-03-04T22:20:00.003Z

Scope creep is the expansion of project requirements beyond what was originally identified at the start of the project. In traditional waterfall projects, changes to requirements are usually managed through a change request process. In DSDM, RAD and Agile projects, changes are incorporated into the iterative cycles.

Scope creep is often cited as a reason for project failure, because the additional work adds to the cost and time taken to develop a project. Project managers will therefore try to minimise scope creep as far as is possible, but change happens. It is estimated that requirements can change by 5% a month, so it is important that if changes are implemented, they must be worth the bother and expense of fitting them in..

However if change requests are not managed properly, not only will the project be more expensive and off the gantt chart, but what started out as a project to build a rowing boat can easily end up as a garden shed.

In bygone days the MOSCOW rules were sufficient to filter changes:

M: Must have

S: Should have

C: Could have

W: Would have if we could

Today a more reliable technique to ensure that changes are relevant and useful is benefit mapping. At iJourneys we are big proponents of benefit mapping to develop project requirements, because it is a method of linking the VISION to OBJECTIVES to REQUIREMENTS to DELIVERABLES (SCOPE) to BENEFITS. So if we believe that projects are there only to deliver benefits to clients, then any changes to the project scope must also contribute to delivering benefits.

We must get over the hang up that scope creep is bad for a project. Scope creep is OK if the changes contribute to richer benefits. We must also recalibrate our view of what constitutes project failure. Projects can run over schedule and be re-scheduled, costs can be reviewed, and the extra spend justified, if the end (the benefits) justify the means. Benefit mapping is the tool that can demonstrate whether this is true.

The Problem with Project Sponsors

2010-02-20T09:50:00.008Z

It is generally accepted that keeping your project team close and your project sponsors closer, is a way to ensure project success. After all these are the stakeholders that provide that vital link to the business. Keeping this group of stakeholders sweet, will usually keep the rest of the business off your back.
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Stakeholder support is the rotor that keeps any project afloat, but the problem with project sponsors is that they have got to where they are, by climbing a very dirty greasy pole. They now have a privileged aerial view of the executive landscape, and they fully intend to stay there. The slightest hint or whiff of them being on the wrong side of an issue, especially if it is your project that is the issue, then it is odds on that you will lose lose your project patronage, faster than a tear can roll down Gordon Brown's cheek.

Management of project sponsorship is usually conducted at a programme level, and most programme managers have not just arrived on a push bike. Programme managers innately understand the problem with project sponsors. They know that they are fickle friends, which have to be kept onside. They understand that project communication must be managed.

Therefore is it best to come clean with project issues immediately, or should we wait? Could be we can fix it before the next Highlight Report is due. If we are running behind schedule or over budget, there is always the opportunity to get back on track before we have to report again. If we do report the real project status now, it will only lead to investigation and recrimination which will ultimately delay the project anyway.

If you thought spin was confined to Number 10, think again. How can 70% of project fail? Often because project sponsors do not want to hear bad news, and programme managers do not want to tell it.

The Impossible Project Triangle

2010-02-11T20:45:00.026Z

We are grateful to PMhut for providing some of the longer term statistics behind our piece: 'Project Managers are Rubbish'. The figures are taken from the Standish Group CHAOS Report, which monitors project management success and failure.

The trend is revealing and consistent. Since the survey began in 1994, around 70% of projects have failed consistently. That is to say: these projects have either/or delivered less than specified, and/or exceeded their schedule, and/or cost more than initially budgeted.

In our piece before last we laid the blame on project managers, and in our last article we explained in our view, one of the big reasons why project managers get it wrong.

However we also think that it is time to start challenging our view of what projects are. To quote PRINCE a project has these three characteristics:

A finite and defined life cycle.
Defined and measurable business products.
A defined amount of resources.

If c'70% of projects cannot be delivered within these three constraints, then we have an impossible project triangle. So is it time to consider, not why we cannot work within these three constraints, but why we ever try to work within them at all?

In the 70's when IT project management was in it's infancy, IT project management borrowed the methodology and techniques of capital engineering projects. However what was good for building a new lathe in 1975, is now no longer appropriate for a banking securities system in the 21st century.

So where do we go from here? The answer is simple, we remove the three fixed constraints of time, resource and scope and replace them with variable constraints. The Joint Strike Fighter project which was started in 2002, is late and the cost of the fighter will now be double that envisaged at the start. In other words the risk premium is 100%. However if for example we were just redeveloping a simple interface between two legacy systems, then the risk premium may be only 5%. Projects have risk, and that risk should be reflected right at the start, in the proposal.

Risk should be an integral part of the business case. The client must be made aware right from the very beginning of the project, that the project should be managed within parameters that are directly related to the +x% level of perceived risk, and as a result a contingency of +x% in terms of the resource required, the schedule and the scope should be incorporated into the estimate.

Contingency is too often the slack that we build into a project, but do not dare to mention. So be bold, and share that risk with the client up front, so that the client can use that information to decide whether to go with the project or cancel. It is also important to demonstrate how the risk will be managed during the life of the project, and how using tools such as Earned Value Management we can create defined milestones at which the client can not only review project progress, but also re-evaluate whether the level of contingency and the risk premium is still worth the benefits to be delivered.

The Top Ten Botched IT Projects

2010-02-07T15:13:00.006Z

The Independent newspaper has published a survey of the top ten government IT projects that have failed i.e. projects that were either / or over schedule, over budget, or cancelled. The survey shows that these ten projects alone will have cost the taxpayer £26bn. This extraordinary waste of money is equivalent to half the budget for Britain's schools.

The Independent list of doomed projects, includes some which have appeared on these pages before i.e. : National Programme for IT 12.5bn, National Offender Management System £155m, and Libra system for magistrates courts £400m. However there are many which are new to us e.g. the Defence Information Infrastructure £7.1bn, which is now 18 months late and £180m over budget.

This is a terrible indictment of project management, and just adds weight to the Standish report, which we have discussed over the past couple of issues. If 70% of IT project fail, then it should not be surprising that those in the public sector which usually have the biggest budgets, fail spectacularly.

Projects Fail Because Project Managers are Doing the Wrong Project

2010-01-26T23:11:00.005Z

It is all a bit much ranting and raving about the state of project management (see the previous entry), without offering solutions. Too many project managers are not very good, too many are not tough enough, but too many end up taking the wrap for a failing project which is clearly outside their control. It is a bit of a project oxymoron: management and lack of control. So it is worth an examination of how it comes about.

Projects start as ideas, and the idea is worked into a proposal or proposition by the business. As the proposal is developed, business requirements are defined and a business case built. The business sign off on the business case, capital is allocated, and the project commences with the appointment of a project manager. At this stage, two of the points on our project management triangle: scope and resource are firmly hammered into the ground.

Does this sound familiar? We are being set up to fail, not because we are doing the project wrong, but because we are doing the wrong project. We are doing a project that has not been designed to be doable, but one that has been designed by the business to attract scarce capital resource. Consequently the business case will have described a proposal rich in features, that can be built at minimum cost, to an aggressive timescale. As a result the project is impossible to deliver.

This is why according to Standish, two thirds of all projects fail. Projects fail because project managers are not doing the right project. The work of the business has now been largely achieved. They have analysed the problem, issue or opportunity and developed a solution. Gained agreement to a proposal, and taken it to the Board and obtained funding. Job done. That is not to say they are not interested in the results, but there are now other priorities, new problems, issues and opportunities. The business has moved on.

The PM is left now to get on with it. Project managers that are not good enough or not tough enough, plough immediately into the detail, raise project documentation, organise governance and lose themselves in MSProject. However this is the time, to get in there, stamp some authority on the project and reshape it. We think the best technique to use is benefit mapping.

Get back to the business, re-engage with the team who developed this proposal. Let them know that maybe the project could be implemented for less cost, and more quickly, if the benefits could be prioritised. This makes business sense. They will listen.

Using short workshops with the business, work with them to properly define the benefits. Then working backwards define the capability required to deliver those benefits. Consider then the outcomes / requirements that will deliver that capability. Redefine the vision and objectives of the project to meet those outcomes. Vision is now aligned with benefits. The scope of the project is now aligned with the benefits. Resourcing and planning can follow.

Go back to the business, with a new plan which delivers their business priorities. Perhaps it now cannot be completed in less time or less cost, but they threw you a curved ball. Now is the time to pitch it back.

Project Managers are Rubbish

2010-01-21T21:03:00.009Z

We came across the Standish Report for 2009, which once again delivers the news that those of us who are project managers, are little better than totally incompetent:

‘This year’s results show a marked decrease in project success rates, with 32% of all projects succeeding which are delivered on time, on budget, with required features and functions’ says Jim Johnson, chairman of The Standish Group, ‘44% were challenged which are late, over budget, and/or with less than the required features and functions and 24% failed which are cancelled prior to completion or delivered and never used.’

Well certainly two out of three of us are. The pages on this site often explore the reasons why projects fail, and the usual culprits of scope creep, lack of sponsorship, blah, blah, etc, etc, are rolled out time and time again, but however we try to disguise the facts. We have to admit that we are useless. Project failure is the project manager's fault.

The client looks at our business card, and on it is written: Project Manager. The client then makes the assumption (wrongly it would appear, two out of three times) that we can do what it says on the tin. We have to face facts, we can't. Project failure is our fault, it is the result of poor project management.

It is time to face our demons, we are not as damn clever as we thought we were. In fact we are little better than rubbish at project management. One out of three is not a good run rate. There are books full of project management advice and the internet is grinding under the weight of: "The Ten Secrets of Project Success", "Six Keys to Successful Project Based Work", and "Three Habits of Effective Project Leadership" blah, blah, etc,etc, but we are not improving. According to Standish, project management is getting worse. Project failure is our fault, and it is getting worse.

Lets face it, as a profession we have to be better than this. If we went into surgery we would not accept a two out of three failure rate from any surgeon. At the World Cup this year we are not going to say, well it's OK England won every third game. We get really angry when we take our car to the garage and then it goes wrong again. We shout at the TV about MP's milking the system and doing a rubbish job, and when HMRC get our tax code incorrect, we know all the f..king lot are a waste of space.

Well join the club, we are not any good either. We are supposedly experts in change, but we have to look at ourselves before we make any changes out there. It would appear that PRINCE or the APM have made not a jot of difference. We have to take it on the chin, dust ourselves down and do better.

How? That my friends is the big question and one we will be returning to.

iJourneys Change Storyboard

2010-01-19T23:30:00.005Z

There have been a number of requests, (well a couple actually actually), to show the iJourneys Change Storyboard which is set as a background on Twitter.
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This change storyboard was used with a global corporate who were anxious to change the culture of their IT teams across Europe and Africa. Their aim was to encourage their ICT function to become more proactive, less technically obsessed and more integrated with the business. We called the journey: Change Agents.
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The change storyboard technique is simple. The leadership team work through the discover, define, deliver and drive change process, by participating in a series of facilitated workshops. The workshops use the graphic maps shown in the blue boxes. The graphic maps enable the participants to examine every aspect of the change e.g.
.................

Current Climate

Statement of Need
Generate Options
Solution Blueprint
Team Design
Communication Plan etc etc

For the workshops we print these maps really big so that everyone can get involved and contribute.

Once the Change Storyboard is completed, we then invite other groups who will be affected by the change to follow the leadership team and tread the same journey. Through facilitated workshops they too have access to the same information, work through similar thinking, experience the same issues, concerns and risks, and in the end perhaps unsurprisingly reaching similar conclusions.

Invariably however these teams also challenge and provide new and valuable insights and ideas that will enhance the outcome.

The simple idea is that the change journey is understood, developed, enhanced and owned by those that will both lead the change and be affected by it.

The Rumsfeld Guide to Project Management

2010-01-16T14:08:00.000Z

At the risk of asking one of my elderly relatives to suck an egg, a brief resume of the management of risks and issues.

Issues are things that are happening now, which are affecting the project and need to be managed and resolved. Risks are things that may happen at some point in the future and require management to prevent them happening..

Issues and risks are known, and we can manage them within our risk management strategy. In the terms of Rumsfeld's famous quote: .

"There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we do not know we don’t know"..

these are known knowns. .....

Project management is however never black or white, there is a lot of grey. However tight the requirements, the business analysis, and the system design, there are lots we don't know and the deeper we get into the project, there is more we know we don't know...

How many times have we sat in a meeting, and someone on the client side asks, "How will the system do this?". We may know, but if we do not, it is a known unknown. How often do the technical team, shrug their shoulders and say that they are working on a solution. It is a known unknown.

We need to manage known unknowns to the point they where they become risks or can be dismissed. We use a Known Unknown Log (KULog) which lists the source , date, details, progress and resolution.

We have considered a Unknown Unknown Log, but strangely that has always remained blank.

Update from Kings Cross

2010-01-07T18:00:00.001Z

Following on from the last piece, looks like Cameron has some convincing to do. The graffiti reads "I'll cut the deficit, the NHS, the BBC, Ordnance Survey, Anything whatever in fact. We should not be allowed to govern again."

We Can't Go On Like This

2010-01-06T19:51:00.005Z

It is going to be a Tory bi-line in the up coming election, "We can't go on like this", accompanied by their big banner slogan "A Year For Change", but is not wanting to put up with what we have now, ever a good basis for making change?

It is certainly usually the prime motivator. We survey the ASIS and begin to envisage the TOBE, and in between there is a little thing we call change. Change is powerful, often because it means different things to different people, my change is different to your change, my TOBE is my own.

Designing change is always going to be difficult, just look at some of the government initiatives we have covered during 2009. No wonder politicians concentrate on what is wrong with now, and talk about change as if it is as easy as Merlin casting a spell.

However, if politicians can make you believe that their change, is a bit like the change you want, better health service, better education, a pound off a pint, then the word "change" works. Cameron mentioned it twenty three times in a speech over the weekend, and it worked for Obama so why could it not work for Cameron as well.

Digital Inclusion

2009-12-07T23:05:00.005Z

Today Prime Minister Brown announced that all the UK government transactions and business was moving on-line i.e. child benefit, VAT, school reports, crime maps, student loans, job seekers allowance, working tax credits, employer tax returns etc. This programme of activity is meant to bring efficiency savings of £400m and will be in place in five years time.

How does Gordon know? Can we as taxpayers inspect any functional requirements, examine the business case maybe, or peruse the plans outlining which service will come on line when. It must be that the estimate of the financial benefits, and the cost (which was not revealed) do have some foundation in analysis, but we have no way of knowing.

This is all the work of Martha Lane Fox, who recently joined the government as Champion of Digital Inclusion, so all this maybe a bit last minute. On Martha's site however she does provide a link to this report from PricewaterhouseCoopers where at least the thinking behind the initiative has been shared. However we look forward to more digital inclusion .

(NB we like the way thae PricewaterhouseCoopers use logic chains to map the benefits: Input > Activity > Output > Outcome > Impact)

IT Should Lead Business Change

2009-11-23T20:08:00.025Z

Thanks to Girls Guide to bringing to our attention this book IT-Enabled Change by Sharm Manwari. We haven't read the book because it costs £21.82 even from Amazon, so this is not a review of a book we have not read.

We don't know what's in this book, but last year about this time, we wrote a piece about business change and the role of IT. The article was Business Change - Some Questions? and was written in response to a Harvard Business Review article that reported on research across US corporations. The research investigated which of the levers of business change i.e people, process or IT, really distinguished successful businesses.

The answer in a nutshell was that companies with a higher than average spend on IT, were more successful than those with much less spend. However this was not because of technology spend per se, but because these companies combined IT spend with enabling processes.

A word from the report's author: Harvard Business School Professor McAfee:

'Enterprise software like ERP and CRM systems, coupled with cheap networks, is allowing companies to replicate their unique business processes quickly, widely, and faithfully, in the same way that a digital photo can be endlessly reproduced.'

Too often IT departments are the boiler room of any organisation, keeping vital hardware, systems, and networks running, but CIOs should rethink their role and look to become the engineers of change.

Business processes too often have no specific owner within an organisation, and exist as weird threads between different functional stove pipes. Processes have all the characteristics of networks, and over the next few years as processes become increasingly automated, IT will have the opportunity to take control of business processes as well as IT.

Then with both levers of change firmly in their hands, CIOs will be in a much stronger position to work with talented people and lead business change within their organisation.

Pigs Cannot Fly

2009-11-22T23:06:00.015Z

Research has confirmed that pigs cannot fly, that alcoholics evidently enjoy a drink, and that IT projects that are linked to business strategy are more likely to succeed.

That is according to research in Canada, not pigs flying but IT projects not succeeding unless linked to business strategy.

Lets' assume most of us believe that this is bleedin' obvious , then what is really surprising from this research, is that 17% of respondents thought that the IT projects for which they were responsible, added little or no strategic value to their organisation.

So does that mean that around one in five IT projects are not worthwhile, and does that mean that pigs can fly?

A Sense of Urgency About Change

2009-11-15T19:50:00.008Z

You would think that the Harvard Business School would have more sophisticated facilities, than the cramped studio and camcorder which seems to have been used in this interview, but the content, which is only ten minutes long is interesting. It is about the need for urgency when implementing change.

Here John Kotter talks about how important it is to bring the outside, into the inside of organisations to fuel their sense of urgency about change. Too often he explains that the calm interior of the organisation does not reflect the challenge and conflict of the market place. It is analogous to a shell landing on the British generals in WW1, who drank claret and studied their maps in luxurious chateaux while the Battle of the Somme raged fifty miles away.

Delivering a Project is Not the End

2009-11-15T19:40:00.011Z

Too many programme managers concentrate on delivering projects to time and budget rather than ensuring their projects deliver the benefits that were promised. This is because too many change initiatives do not have any benefits management.

Benefits management is about ensuring that the key benefits of any change are properly identified, e.g. increased efficiency or more effective service delivery, and that these benefits are made to come alive in the business. Benefits management should ensure that the programme can define exactly what each benefit will deliver in a way that can be measured, and that every benefit can be mapped to a planned outcome, and every outcome linked to a project deliverable. Furthermore every benefit should also be assigned to an owner who will be responsible and accountable for its eventual realisation.

Too often programme managers set their sights on an end date and project delivery, but that is just the start of delivering the benefits. To paraphrase the great man, delivering the programme is not the beginning of the end, but it is the end of the beginning.

Porridge Best Served Cold

2009-11-04T23:55:00.019Z

"Norman Stanley Fletcher, you have pleaded guilty to the charges brought by this court and it is now my duty to pass sentence. You are an habitual criminal who accepts arrest as an occupational hazard and presumably accepts imprisonment in the same casual manner. I therefore feel constrained to sentence you to the maximum term allowed for these offences. You will go to prison for five years"

Norman played by Ronnie Barker in that glorious seventies sitcom always managed to come out the winner against a bungling prison system. So how he would have chuckled at the mess that the Ministry of Justice has made of building a system to track offenders through the courts and into prison, (i.e. a system to know where prisoners are!). The result has ended up as a 'shambles' according to a Public Accounts Committee Report which was published a few days ago.

It is not as though the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) have not seen numerous examples of vast amounts of government money wasted on computer projects, but this sorry tale is enough to turn any old lags head. The system was supposed to provide full tracking of offenders from the courts, through prison, release and probation, but project costs trebled to £700m and the project became “out of control” and three years late.

The usual culprits of poor project management were lined up in an identity parade back in May, when the reasons for project failure were examined by the PAC.

The evidence was overwhelming:

Firstly, it appears that the Project Board only met once every two months. Furthermore the Board did not manage the project, because it accepted the programme team's assurances that the project was being delivered to time and budget. There was a prevalent culture within the Department of just passing on good news.

Secondly, accurate reports to ministers on any problems were not produced. A senior member of the committee, said it was "incredible that for three years nobody senior knew what was being delivered for the money spent". The PAC were told that people had asked questions but were told that "actually the programme was all going well".

Thirdly, the senior responsible owner (SRO) of the project had never run an IT project before. MPs on the committee were unable to ascertain why she had been appointed SRO.

The case against the Ministry of Justice therefore revolves around project governance, and particularly the role of the SRO and the Project Board. Neither party is there to manage the project, but what they must do is ensure that the project is being managed. In this case it clearly was not. Their role is to impose accountability, and assurance around delivery.

The dilemma is how can a Project Board know when an experienced programme manager and smooth talking supplier (in this case EDS) are being economical with the truth.

The answer is to put people on the Project Board who know about projects and know about IT. People who can ask the difficult questions and understand the answers and ask the questions again until they are satisfied with the response. Such skills and experience are difficult to find in most organisations, because it calls for that rarest of individuals. Someone who understands IT, but also understands business.

Indeed what is required is a character like Fletch who understands computer systems as well as he understood the prison system.

Bad Business Cases Cost Lives

2009-10-29T19:55:00.013Z

A business case is meant to be a rational unbiased appraisal of a business change. It carefully weighs the balance of business benefits against the cost. It may appear a dry and fusty financial document, but the dull exterior can often hide the passion and emotion that contributed to it.

Resource in any organisation is carefully rationed, so a successful business case sign off, can mean that you win and someone else loses, and winning and losing is the body politic of any organisation. Winning is career enhancing, losing is not.

In our MOD case study there are not only ambitious individuals climbing the greasy pole, but there is fierce inter-service rivalry. Cash spent on a new Trident submarine for the Navy, can mean less helicopters in Afghanistan for the RAF, but failing to have adequate scrutiny of any of the projects means that the MOD becomes overstretched and fails to deliver :

This overheating arises from a mixture of incentives within the Ministry of Defence. In particular, the Armed Forces, competing for scarce funding, quite naturally seek to secure the largest share of resources for their own needs, and have a systematic incentive to underestimate the likely cost of equipment.

Unfortunately the current system is not able to flush out at an early stage the real costs of this equipment, nor does it make effective prioritisation or rationalisation decisions. As the MoD almost never cancels an equipment order, the process of over-ordering and under-costing is not constrained by fear on the part of those ordering equipment that the programme will be lost.

Equipment plan construction is dominated by a “bottom up” aggregation process, which makes it hard for “top down” strategic guidance to control the balance of investment. Effective forums do not currently exist to allow top down guidance to control the evolution of the equipment programme.

These forces and incentives create an over-large equipment programme, which contains within it a significant underestimate of the likely out-turn, making the programme even less affordable than it appears at any given moment in time. When this over-large and inflating programme meets the hard cash planning totals that the MoD can spend each year, the Department is left with no choice but to slow down its rate of spend on programmes across the board.

The result is that programmes take significantly longer than originally estimated, because the Department cannot afford to build them at the originally planned rate.

All this would be bad enough in any organisation, but cost cutting in the MOD can cost lives, as the report by Charles Haddon-Cave QC into the death of 14 service personnel who died in 2006, when a Nimrod crashed in Afghanistan, so clearly demonstrates. Unfortunately it does not stop there, as this excellent article from the Independent illustrates.

Project Managers Must Read This

2009-10-29T00:24:00.008Z

A couple of weeks ago a report was leaked to The Times newspaper. The report was about MOD procurement. The report headline was that:

Across a large range of programmes, this study found that the average programme overruns by 80% or c.5 years from the time specified at initial approval through to in service dates. The average increase in cost of these programmes is 40% or c.£300m.

The report is over 300 pages and can be found from a link here. However, although this report contains a lot of acronyms and statistics it is written not by some retired judge or some fusty civil servant but by Bernard Gray, who in earlier life was a respected journalist.

So the report is not only immensely readable (if you happen to be a project geek) but has some fantastic insights into how and more importantly, how not to manage projects. Forget PRINCE, all project managers should read this.

What we will do over the next few weeks is extract some of the nuggets contained in the report. It will take a few weeks because the report is very long, but stick with us because this is a project management case study on an epic scale.

Y2.1K

2009-10-08T21:01:00.001+01:00

It is all history now, but the millennium bug was a big scare in the late 1990's. It was a scare that seemed so 21st century, and encompassed all that was great, and all that was alarming about information technology. The information technology age was barely fifty years old. It had only been in the 1940’s that the first computer: Colossus had been built at Bletchley Park by the brilliant GPO engineer Tommy Flowers, and the first programs had been compiled by the mathematics genius Alan Turing.

It was those early days of programming that were ultimately at the core of the millennium bug. In the 1960's & 1970's, when computing really got underway, systems programmers tried to minimise code to save precious memory. As a result year dates were coded with two digits; e.g. 97, 98, 99, 00. Little thought was ever given to the year 2000. Back then the 21st Century would have seemed so far in the future, that by then even Dan Dare would have hung up his space suit. However, programs that were once developed on punch cards, were converted to paper tape, then magnetic tape. The ghost was in the machine.

To solve the problem, organisations around the world, investigated the code in every program ever written. Organisations that had developed their own software had to examine every line of code. Organisations that used proprietary software had to ensure that all the software they used was Y2K compliant. The alternative was that payrolls would not roll, that traffic lights would go on the blink, that planes would drop out of the sky, that missiles would leave their silos, and that the banking system would grind into meltdown.

The banking system did go into meltdown, but that was ten years later. In the late 1990’s all organisations instigated Y2K projects to stop these events happening.

Y2K was a change that affected every unit, every department, every business, every area, in every region, in every country within and outside an organisation. The notion of developing systems down stove pipes was no longer relevant. The need was to pull all Y2k projects together, and manage them together across all areas of business. The programme had come of age.

Y2K programmes blossomed in most organisations around the world, as organisations looked at one another and quickly adopted best practice. The situation was unique, for once any thought of competitive advantage was put on hold as the world worked together to avoid a digital catastrophe.

The benefits of making change happen through a programme of activity were quickly realised:

Coordinate projects / work / activity across the space to focus on an overiding objective.

The programme is given the same status as other functions or business units, even though it is a temporary entity.

Its has its own dedicated leadership team, which is heavily and actively sponsored by the senior leadership team.

Risk is managed centrally by the programme, and not fragmented across the enterprise.

Y2K was a success. There was virtually no digital disruption. The world was saved, but as important, the way in which that success was won became the way that organisations would approach future change. The legacy of Y2K in Y2.1K is programme management.

Layer Cake

2009-09-14T22:44:00.007+01:00

The latest version of PRINCE2 (2009) introduces the concept of layering, i.e. tailoring the PRINCE2 methodology to the complexity of your project. Easy projects have some PRINCE2 and scary projects need lots of it. Evidently PRINCE2 is no longer just a project methodology, but more of a tool kit that the Project Manager can use to hammer their projects together.

Most likely most Project Managers will already use PRINCE2 in this way, and so will be well used to doing their own hammering and layering. Project Managers are usually quick on the uptake and will have learnt how to create a PRINCE2 compliant project with the minimum of documentation, bureaucracy and effort. If not, then they should take the advice of Eddie Temple a character in the film Layer Cake (2004) who said, 'You're born, you take shit. You get out in the world, you take more shit. You climb a little higher, you take less shit. Till one day you're up in the rarefied atmosphere and you've forgotten what shit even looks like. Welcome to the layer cake son'.

Not So Hot

2009-09-14T22:09:00.000+01:00

No a lot of activity on this blog lately. Why?

Well to paraphrase Lyndon B Johnson. Writing a blog is a lot like pissing down your leg. It seems hot to you, but never does to anyone else.

Watch this space.

The Hedgehog and the Fox

2009-08-16T23:25:00.022+01:00

Too often we are asked, 'Do we really need a Project Manager?' That question is then usually followed by some justification. This project is: quite small / there is no rush / the technical team know what it is all about / Jason has been on a Prince course / Barry from Finance is leading on this etc etc.

Then that makes us think. Is a PM really necessary? What do they add?

This is a bit off the wall, but for a moment try thinking of a project team, as a fox leading a bunch of hedgehogs!

"The Hedgehog and the Fox" is the title of an essay by Isaia Berlin. Berlin's essay essentially describes intellectuals and a fundamental difference that may divide human thinking. Some people think broad brush like foxes, while others are single minded and stubborn about detail and think like hedgehogs, they are the experts who know one big thing.

Berlin illuminated his analogy by explaining that hedgehogs "relate everything to a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance." Foxes, on the other hand, "pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, … their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects."

The Project Manager's role is like that of Mr Fox, pulling disparate stuff together, dealing with stakeholders and suppliers, organising and motivating the team, planning the work, sorting the detail while also having the bigger view in mind, about how the project fits the business, and how one project relates to others.

Invariably PMs are foxes managing an army of hedgehogs. Hedgehogs are the experts in one big thing, whether that be detailed technical knowledge of software development, security, networking, technical architecture or whatever. The role of the Project Manager which is wide and very diffused, is very different to that of the individuals in the team. Both roles, that of the wiley fox and the single minded hedgehog are very different, but both are just as important.

So is a Project Manager required for every project? Perhaps not for all projects, but next time you have to work with a bunch of prickly bastards, you will know.

High Speed Organisations Can Wait

2009-08-02T19:25:00.014+01:00

Back in January we wrote about how experts were beginning to infiltrate their way into the ranks of ministers, in a madcap attempt by Gordon Brown to get things done. We have also frequently discussed the frustration that any government must have in trying to make things happen, and our pages are full of examples of stuff just not happening or JDDI (Just Don't Do It)

Will Hutton writing in the Observer today was writing about the the state of the country's transport infrastructure, and why it was so appalling that there were no high speed links between major centres. It is amazing how far the UK is behind the rest of Europe:

There are 3,480 miles of railway in operation in Europe where trains can travel at 150 miles an hour or more. Another 2,160 miles are under construction. Yet another 5,280 miles are planned. More than 10,000 miles in all. Britain has just 68 miles and the planning for more began a mere six months ago. It's humiliating. In this key 21st-century capability, Britain is a banana republic.

In the January article we also highlighted the Secretaries of State for Transport, and in particular the last incumbent Geoff Hoon, who Hutton describes as a 'do-as-little-as-possible politician'

His next point was most telling, and explains some of what is behind what we have called a 'crisis of delivery'. These are Hutton's words:

Few ministers do take the initiative. They are overwhelmed by the round of endless meetings, [and] officials who are more keenly aware of the risks than the rewards of any action and who want to keep their secretary of state out of trouble.

Leaders in too many organisations get dumbed down by too much day to day and then become unsure of themselves in an irresistible urge to be risk averse. It becomes easier to talk the talk rather than walk the walk, so they take the easy route. Senior management who advise Just Dont Do It are never held to account.

The average tenure of a CEO of a top 100 corporation in the States is three years and most are in their 50's when they take up the job. It is not very different in the UK, in any business or organisation. For example at the Department of Transport there have been ten Secretaries of State in the last twelve years.

So are these leaders going to rock the socks of their organisations with change. No way, nice and steady does it, high speed organisations can wait.

Agile Project Management

2009-07-23T23:59:00.016+01:00

So much about Agile Project Management is just so right, because I think we all agree that traditional project management has limitations:

(BRUF) Big Requirements Up Front does not work because people do not know what they want. They usually have to see it, feel it, and hold it before they know it is right.

As a result scope creep has to happen, otherwise how can a project reflect the changes that the client identifies along the way. Projects should not be like the 12.30 at Newmarket where a flag is lowered, and only the bookies know the outcome. Projects must be a journey (apologies if we sound like tarts) but there should be the opportunity to continually review and change what will be delivered, otherwise there is a good chance that the client will be disappointed. "I know I said this is what I wanted but what I meant was.....".

(BDUF) Big Design Up Front, does not work either, because if we really are not sure of the requirements, how can we be sure of the technical architecture, type of development etc.

All these are good reasons for an Agile approach to project management i.e working in small iterative steps, reviewing and moving on to the next iteration. This is not new in the UK, we have experienced RAD (Rapid Application Development) and DSDM (Dynamic Systems Development Method). However iterative development has not become mainstream, although we understand that some companies have used it with success. (We would just like to know who they are).

Traditional project management methods may not allow for change, but at least there is usually (unless the project has been very badly managed) a deliverable. The outcome may not be one that the client recognises, but it at least meets the original requirements.

It is a dichotomy, do we deliver what the client does not want, or do we not deliver what the client really wants.

When a Man Slept with a Pig

2009-07-19T18:54:00.007+01:00

When Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, on 28 June 1914, he was probably not aware that it would lead to a succession of events that would lead to the First World War. When a man slept with a pig in Mexico City, neither the man nor the pig could know, that it would lead to a pandemic of swine flu. Small events can have big consequences and those consequences create big challenges.

In the Second World War if Churchill had not faced the challenge, and lit a fuse under aircraft production, Britain would have been facing the Luftwaffe in Beaufort Bombers rather than Supermarine Spitfires. Today the woefully inadequate number of helicopters in Afghanistan, is a pathetic example of how the present incumbents of the MOD are not even acknowledging the challenge. Someone should knock on their door and let them know where they could find eight Chinooks that have been sitting in a hanger for eight years. See our entry for March 12th which includes a video.

In a similar vein, internal Whitehall wrangling has meant that the FluLine scheme - a network of call centres, automated voice banks and a website, which was first announced in November 2007 is not up and working. This has left GPs surgeries to bear the brunt of the calls, from the worried and the sick. The Treasury it seems did not sign off the business case until December 2008. A spokesman from the DoH (Department of Health) said: "We needed to be sure it was probed and tested sufficiently to ensure value for money".

Part of the problem is the way we do projects, which are nowadays so wrapped in process, methodology, documentation and committees that we need binoculars to see the challenge. Churchill would ask for the synopsis of an issue and a recommended solution on one side of paper, and would famously write, just 'DO IT'.

What is Going to Make Things Change Around Here

2009-06-27T11:06:00.009+01:00

There was an interesting article in the Guardian during the week by Jonathon Freedland, which started, 'What's going to make things change round here'. The banks have lost our trust, and the MP's have lost our trust. Surely change must happen, at the very least some more regulation, and an end to the bonus culture. No. Network Rail is about to pay it's board enormous bonuses for no perceived improvement in performance, publicly funded RBS is to pay its CEO 10m a year, and the Conservative John Bercow has been elected by mostly Labour MPs, not because he promised reform, but just to give the Tory front bench (who did not support him) a poke in the eye with the speaker's rod.

There is a fifth principle of change in the making here, and it paraphrases the Napoleon quotation from the last article . Change cannot happen until fear and self interest tip the balance.

No End of Projects

2009-06-21T12:40:00.019+01:00

When is a project not a project. Answer: When it has no end. Projects are meant to be defined periods of activity, otherwise projects would be just work and that would be no fun.

This month Hazel Blears who was the Communities Minister resigned following some forgetful moments around capital gains tax. Her former ministry, the Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG), has the responsibility for a £1.4bn critical response system, to ensure that the emergency services can better respond to major incidents. The FiReControl system project was originally meant to go live in 2007, and provide important cover, especially during the 2012 Olympics.

However, 'The project is in meltdown and may not be properly tested and in place for 2012', according to the Fire Brigades' Union assistant general secretary, Andy Dark. It does not take a gantt head to know that a project with no end will not deliver

When we are presented with gantt charts that start the project in the the top left hand corner, and then slowly work their way to the bottom left of the page like an elegant regency staircase, we are always curious.

Because too often project managers try to deliver the whole package, in one lump at some future date, and that does not always work. Especially if the lump is very big, and the future is a long way off. Projects are like pineapples, they are best consumed in chunks.

The frightening challenge for any project manager is to get ahead of the rule around project requirements. Project requirements change on average around 5% / month. This means that by the end of the first year, half the requirements are no longer relevant, and by the second year, the likelihood is, that the project if restarted would have delivered different things. Its just a fact of life, the world moves on, so why should we expect project requirements to stand still.

There is an old adage that you should not try and eat anything bigger than your own head, and that goes for projects too. Chunking the project to create a constant stream of deliverables, creates momentum, delivers benefits to the client fast, and keeps the project relevant.

In the Name of Self Interest

2009-06-04T22:03:00.006+01:00

The Greek tragedy currently being played out in Downing Street has Gordon Brown hanging on to power, not because as he says he 'wants to get on with the job', but because it is absolutely in his own self interest to remain there. It is interesting to observe such blatant self interest in action, usually self interest is hidden behind the smoke and mirrors of higher ideals, but as has become apparent from this whole MPs expenses saga, most MPs are in it for themselves, whether for financial gain or like Gordon Brown there for other self interested motives: power, influence, ambition, ego.

There is now little or no support for Brown, even yesterday's left leaning Guardian leader was scathing. There are talks of coups and back bench rebellions, and many commentators think Brown will not last the weekend. If he does not resign, then he has to be brought down. Either his ministers, the men in the grey boiler suits will tell him to go, or 70 Labour MPs have to ballot to get him out. How likely is this to happen?

Simple. If it is in their self interest to do it they will, if it is not they will not. As Napoleon said: 'Men are moved by two levers only: fear and self interest'. Indeed change only happens when self interest tips the balance, there are no higher ideals.

Email Sinks Below Wave

2009-05-30T12:05:00.004+01:00

Email is little changed in twenty years. Will it stay the same for the next twenty year? Not if Google have their way. Make way for Wave, the new Google communication and collaboration tool that was announced on Thursday.

Is it the future? Well Google have a way of creating the future now.

Principles of Change

2009-05-25T18:59:00.006+01:00

When we wrote back in July about MPs being Up To Their Trotters in Slurry we could not have imagined that they were buried in the brown stuff right up to their noses, and that the stench was a stink that would so infuriate the country that it would lead to a revolution. The revolution has yet to start, but without doubt once a political elite loses moral authority then everything is lost. Wholesale revolution and change whether peaceful or violent will follow.

In July we used the shenanigans of the political classes to demonstrate our third principle of change:

Be complacent enough, and change will seek you out.

It has taken ten months to materialise.

Watch now as our political masters try to introduce too little and too late reforms to try and gain control, because this will demonstrate our fourth principle of change:

Change which is not channelled becomes overwhelming.

Again watch this space.

Just do(n't do) it

2009-04-22T23:25:00.020+01:00

Matthew Parris writing in the Times last weekend was arguing that the government were continually announcing new initiatives but never delivering. His point was political. Announce a policy or a plan, which grabs a headline, or pushes unpleasant news for the government into the long grass, and it is a job well done.

Last week a £5000 subsidy for people buying electric cars in 2011 was announced. On the same day, a report was published which severely criticised the Home Office over the 'Keystone Kops' arrest of the Tory home affairs frontbencher Damien Green. Just a coincidence or will the green car really get a £5000 boost in two years time?

Some examples of best laid plans that have fizzled out:

Citizens Juries : now defunct.

Statement of Values & British Bill of Rights : never happened.

Building Schools for the Future : every secondary school is to be rebuilt, but only 90 are complete.

Risk and Regulation Advisory Council: just one press release!

Community Kitty for Every Neighbourhood : no sign yet.

National Internship Scheme: try exploring their 'large' database of jobs.

Free Internet Access for Poor Families: still waiting.

Some of this is political posturing, and that is sort of understandable, but what if it is not? What if it is yet more evidence of that malaise of just not doing it? A crisis of delivery that is endemic in so many organisations.

There used to be a character in the Fast Show who used to talk about "the hardest job in the world", but turning strategy into reality, really is.

A clip from the Fast Show.................................................... you muppet.

Common Causes of Project Failure : OCG Best Practice

2009-04-08T23:30:00.011+01:00

One of the best and simplest analyses of project failure was undertaken by the OCG in 2006. It is condensed into a list of eight reasons why projects fail. They are:

1. Lack of clear links between the project and the organisation's key strategic priorities, including agreed measures of success.
2. Lack of clear senior management and Ministerial ownership and leadership.
3. Lack of effective engagement with stakeholders.
4. Lack of skills and proven approach to project management and risk management.
5. Too little attention to breaking development and implementation into manageable steps.
6. Evaluation of proposals driven by initial price rather than long-term value for money (especially securing delivery of business benefits).
7. Lack of understanding of, and contact with the supply industry at senior levels in the organisation.
8. Lack of effective project team integration between clients, the supplier team and the supply chain.

Every project should include this list in their Risk Register and as the project evolves take actions to resolve.

How?

Well please note our innovative colour coding, some management consultants would give their tonsils for stuff like this.

Number 5 no comment. Any project manager would be green, if they could not break down the project into manageable steps. Any organisation that employ PMs that cannot plan, will have accountants that cannot add up.

Number 7. It is easy to get up to your neck in the brown stuff, if suppliers and contracts are mismanaged. Leave the T&Cs to the professionals. As PM just focus on understanding precisely what the supplier will deliver and when.

Nos 4 & 5. Feeling blue, this is where PRINCE2 really can help. So blow the dust off that tatty PRINCE2 manual, because there is lots in there about managing issues and risk, and setting up a governance structure that includes both clients and suppliers.

This is the point we are trying to get to. Half the reasons why projects fail according to the OCG, are about the relationship with the business. It is the business that will judge whether the project stands or fails. That relationship is therefore crucial. We would recommend beginning before the start of the project, with workshops to gain clarity in each of these four areas (1,2,3,&6).

Yes, the project has to link to the strategic priorities of the business or why even bother. Both the project team and the client / stakeholders must intimately understand what the project benefits are, and how these will contribute to the success of the business. This sounds so blatantly obvious, but go back and look at some of the Project Initiation Documents (PIDs) in your organisation and too often the raison d'etra is thinner than a frogs' leg.

Remember why the business wants this project. One reason: benefits. Engage with stakeholders and demonstrate how the benefits are linked to the capabilities, which are the result of the deliverables, which are defined by the project objectives. Use benefits workshops to allow the stakeholders and project team to make that journey themselves from benefits to objectives, and Voila (just to keep to the theme la francais), you will be into the pink.

N.B. Lots more to come about benefit workshops and benefit mapping.

I'm Turning Japanese I Really Think So

2009-04-05T21:07:00.009+01:00

A few months back we wrote about IT outsourcing and the pitfalls. One of the big pitfalls is that once your IT staff are transferred over to an outsource provider, although you still pay for them, you do not pay them. They are not your staff anymore, so do not be surprised at how quickly they turn Japanese, and go native. Once they were your loyal staff whose advice, help and support you could rely on. Now, although in theory they still work with you, they now work for your outsource partner, and your outsource partner has other agendas, which usually includes selling you more things.

So their advice, help and support has subtly changed, but have you noticed?

The Department for Children Schools and Families (DCSF) has been building a £224m database called ContactPoint which includes all the 11m kids aged under 18 in England. The purpose is to protect vulnerable children, but the database which started in 2003, has been built against a background of opposition from groups worried about data security. However it was only in March, some six years later that work on the project was halted due to security fears.

A report from the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust has found that the majority of government databases have 'significant [security] problems and may be unlawful'. ContactPoint was described by the Trust as fundamentally flawed. This was also surely glaringly obvious to the DCSF, when earlier this year the children of MP's and celebrities were asked to be excluded from the database. Why could everyone else see the bleedin' obvious, but the DCSF continue to plough on.

One explanation is that outsourcing has stripped government departments of in-house IT skills. In 2006 for example, the Public Accounts Committee found that the Child Support Agency database failed in part, because it had handed the project over to the contractor EDS, and did not have sufficient knowledge internally to manage the project, because most of its IT staff now worked for EDS.

This is a fundamental flaw in how the Government procures and manages IT. The Rowntree report has this advice for ministers: "If you think IT is the solution to your problem, then you don't understand IT, and you don't understand your problem either."

Memories are Made with Microsoft

2009-03-26T00:07:00.012Z

Something that Microsoft has been trying to pull off for years is trying to capture life experience digitally, so that if you ever get time at sometime later in life, you can go back and replay your whole life once again in real time. The big question that researcher Gordon Bell seems to be trying to understand is why anyone would want to do such a thing. It's all very well keeping a diary, but do we really want to watch that DFS sofa commercial time and time again.

One other comment. I bet there are not many technology researchers like Gordon who is only 70, still at work in the UK. Age diversity really rocks in the US.

Augmented Reality

2009-03-23T21:23:00.007Z

If you thought Google Street View was cool, look at what Microsoft has been cooking up, by combining satellite imagery with the pictures that you and I take and post on the web. Using some very clever algorithms, PhotoSynth technology takes all our web based images of famous landmarks, to create seamless 3D images.

Project 10^100

2009-03-23T20:19:00.008Z

Google has been getting some stick this week with the launch of Street View ,which takes Google Earth and expands it with pictures taken from a camera mounted on the roof of a Vauxhall Astra. So combining street with satellite imagery. People have complained because they were exposed doing stuff like vomiting in doorways.

Less well known is another Google initiative Project 10^100. Google asked for projects to be submitted to them, which included ideas to change the world by helping as many people as possible. Google has offered to fund the top ideas with $10m. They have received more than 150,000 ideas.

This is brilliant from two perspectives, firstly the use of wiki principles, reaching out to the web for ideas and then getting people via the web to decide which are the best. Organisations could learn a lot from this approach, imagine reaching out for change via your own intranet to your own people..........we need to change...............give us your ideas..............we will let you vote on which you think is best.

The other perspective is that Google now have 150,000 great ideas, some will go on to benefit the world, and some others which will go on to benefit Google.

A Crisis of Delivery

2009-03-12T19:04:00.023Z

Lord Laming who reviewed children's services in 2003 following the death of Victoria Climbia, was asked by Children's Secretary Ed Balls to look again following the death of Baby P. What he found was that many of his original recommendations had not been implemented.

His report reads:

"In such circumstances it is hard to resist the urge to respond by saying to each of the key services, 'NOW JUST DO IT!'"
"I'm just impatient to make sure that we get ahead and just do it now. It can be done and we could, in these circumstances, have the best child protection services in the world,"

The capitals are his as they appear in the report when it was published this week. They reflect his frustration around the crisis of delivery that is now endemic in so many organisations. There was clear agreement to implement his proposals, they were vital to ensure the safety of vulnerable children, but they were not implemented.

Two more examples from just this week:

The MOD purchased 8 Chinook helicopters eight years ago and have spent time modifying them, at a cost of £163m. The modifications did not work, so the helicopters were mothballed in an air-conditioned hanger, at a time when they are desperately needed in Afghanistan. The eventual cost of each helicopter will be more than a Euro fighter. The National Audit Office this week called it 'a gold standard procurement cock-up'. See video below.

The £234m National Offender Management Information System system, known as C-NOMIS, which was started in 2004 was meant to track offenders through the prison and probation services. However, by July 2007 the project was two years behind schedule and its estimated costs had soared to £690 million. Subsequently the Ministry of Justice abandoned plans for a single shared database in favour of five separate smaller IT projects at a reduced cost of £513 million. The National Audit Office reviewed the systems and concluded that although the revised programme of IT systems would deliver some improvements, the main aim of supporting end-to-end offender management "would not be fulfilled".

There is an ubiquitous malaise in too many organisations,which means that it is impossible to deliver change effectively. Central to that malaise is a lack of understanding of what organisations do? It is very simple. All organisations manage today and manage the future. That is what every government department, every local authority, and every company from the corner shop to Tesco have in common. They manage two things:

Manage current business, the day to day, operations, sales, logistics, hiring and firing, payroll, manufacturing, advertising and marketing, business as usual.

and

Manage future business, strategy, product development, R&D, system development, merger and acquisition, change.

Once organisations grasp this simple principle, and understand what resources have to be devoted to now and what must committed to the future, the changes they have to make to manage both activities will become self evident. There is however no denying the tensions of managing both. Today will always win out.

The pharmaceutical industry is a good role model. What a pharma sells now, is what they developed in the past, what they will sell in the future is being developed today. The past, present and future is one process. That's life, and more organisations must take notice.

Project Assurance: An Absolute Nightmare

2009-03-11T00:06:00.019Z

Some busy body clambering all over your project, poking into dark corners that you would rather they did not see, lifting stones and finding more stones underneath, it's a project manager's absolute nightmare. So what is project assurance all about, and who is the suit with the clipboard and the Prince2 manual.

Project assurance happens at the behest of the project board, and essentially it is an independent check about the status of the project. Does that mean that the board do not trust the project manager? Well yes it does. (Unless that is, your organisation has a mandatory process to ensure all projects are reviewed, and we have never seen one of those).

The key word here is 'independent', so guess what? Every Tom, Dick and Jason in the project consulting world has recognised a nice little earner, and to justify their day rates, have dreamt up their own project assurance methodologies, health checks etc. Little consideration is given to the unfortunate soul who is managing the project, and who is guilty until proved innocent.

With the sound of the gallows being built in the car park, the suits poke about with forensic zeal. Good project managers ( and we mean those that deliver consistently) in our view manage projects with an optimum amount of documentation which fits the complexity, risk, size and scope of the project. To do otherwise risks delivery.

For all consultants, their overriding objective is to get the follow on work, and if they cannot find a real flaw in the project, the easiest way to find fault, is to investigate project documentation and surprise, surprise, find that documentation which is out of date or missing.

"We notice that there is no Lessons Learnt Log"

"The project team did not keep a Quality Log"

"Work Package Descriptions were available for some parts of the project, but not for others"

"A Quality Plan was absent"

In our view the purpose of project assurance is to confirm whether the project board's view of delivery is true. A plain and simple remit that project sponsors should be very clear about, before unleashing the hounds and inflicting fatal injuries.

To project managers, a word to the wise. Agree the project documentation required at the first meeting of the project board. Otherwise when the suits walk through the door, you may as well throw your hands in the air and shout, "Its a fair cop gov".

Tablets of Stone

2009-02-21T20:14:00.008Z

There used to be a programme on BBC television called, Tomorrows World. Many many years ago when they showed one of their presenters using a mobile phone, which was I should add attached to what looked like a suitcase full of electronics, or they might have been valves. I thought then that this will never catch on.

However when I saw tablet PC's I was convinced this was the future of computing. As Bill Gates explains in the attached clip, people will just take their tablet PC into meetings and take notes directly onto the screen.

I also remember going to an exhibition seven or eight years ago and not being very impressed with the Blackberry.

The Consequences of Project Risk

2009-02-14T19:31:00.023Z

We are back with the NHS £12bn patients records system. We know they have got it wrong, but just how wrong is only just emerging. Last week, London's Royal Free Hospital reported that they have had to increase spending by an extra £4m, and incur losses of £6m because the patents record system did not work. Extra staff were drafted in to take over from the system, fewer patients were booked in, and the system could not bill other parts of the NHS.

The consequence of the project failure according to Andrew Way the Chief Executive of the Royal Free, is that due to the cost of the problems relating to the new system, the hospital has not been able to invest in new equipment. Every pound lost due to project failure is another pound that has been lost to patient care. This is a profound consequence of getting things wrong.

As project managers we must always consider risk, and against that risk we record the mitigating actions that we will take, if that risk materialises. What we don't always do is consider the consquences of that risk becoming real. What if we cannot mitigate, what happens then and what happens next? Risk is all about cause and effect, and it is not just important to prepare to mitigate the risk, but also fully understand the downside if the project goes pear shaped. So just as we model the upside outcomes and benefits we should also model the lack of outcomes, the risks and consequences.

Consquence analysis and consequence modelling are important techniques which are used widely in the engineering and pharmaceutical industries, but less so in IT project management, and from recent experience the financial sector. This weekend the CEO of Lloyds, Eric Daniels must be considering just what it was that induced him to agree to the merger with HBOS. A decision which may have a consequence of forcing Lloyds, a proud bank that was established in 1765 into state control and nationalisation.

As Justin Urquhart Stewart of Seven Investment Management told Bloomberg TV, "We now know that while they were working on this shotgun marriage last autumn, HBOS was already pregnant with the spawn of Satan".

Not so much realising the risk and consequences of the downside but also the darkside.

The Problem with Project Managers

2009-02-03T20:11:00.008Z

More in the papers about gigantic overspends and late running projects. Our favourite the colossus that is the NHS records system gets a big mention. (Please note we have a much simpler and cost effective solution, see here N.B. the article was written well before Boris Johnson became London Mayor).

When projects go wrong, the usual culprits are lined up against the wall. It's the fault of 'the government' and / or it's the big bad contractors that are fleecing the public purse, and / or it's the civil service who are spineless and compliant.

Phew, that's us project managers off the hook.

There is though a bit of a niggle, and for all project managers it should be a 'Houston we have a problem', size of niggle. There is a BIG problem with IT projects, because they are obviously not being managed properly. A decade of Prince2, risk management, gantt charts, stakeholder engagement, MSP, benefit realisation management, configuration management, lessons learnt logs, and management of change, does not solve the conundrum of how to deliver projects within scope, time and budget.

Why? Well there is a tendency to jump to conclusions about why, and wade in with solutions, and please this is not a public sector only issue, the private sector is no different, just less public. The Tories are even offering their own solution, no doubt tried and tested on the playing fields of Eton, it is an 'open source' solution as George Osborne explains in the Times. There are also lots of reports and the Public Accounts Committee is going to investigate once again, plus endless books, articles and blogs (some here) that are more than willing to offer some snappy tips.

The solution however is closer to home and a lot more simple. As project managers we should look at ourselves. We may be the problem.

Beware Men in Tights

2009-01-27T20:30:00.018Z

Is Britain bankrupt? No one knows, but few people are certain where the future wealth of this country is going to come from. Looking back, and this is a wild and gross exaggeration, over the past ten years, wealth has been created in the Cty and the financial sector in the South East, captured via taxation and then distributed to the other areas of the UK by the public sector.

The government have been like men in tights, taking from the rich and giving to the poor. It is a Robin Hood economic model, as confirmed by the Sunday Times last weekend, in this article .

As the article describes, in most regions of the UK outside the South East, the public sector contributes around two thirds of local GDP. For example, if Wales was truly an independent principality, the private sector which earns less than 30% of GDP, would struggle to support the remaining 71% of state spending.

In Northern Ireland the state spending is 77% compared to 36% in the South East.

Its as obvious as a dogs dinner, that this level of spending cannot continue, even Hungary as it emerged from communism had state spending of only 60%. What has changed is not any attempt to end the party, but the fact that the piggy bank is empty, and likely to run on empty for the foreseeable future.

Will Hutton has described the City as Iceland on Thames, and what is the capital of Iceland .................... one krona.

The Age of the Train

2009-01-21T23:36:00.021Z

Travelling extensively on the train lately, it can be confirmed that the British Rail sandwich lives on. The National Express East Coast sandwich is called DeliFresh, but this is bit of a misnomer as the sandwich is not fresh, and it's contents could only be found in the bin of any decent delicatessen.

British Rail's take away snacks were not their only problem. One of the others was the APT or Advanced Passenger Train, which was built to tilt. Having been twenty years in gestation, the project came to fruition in the 1970's, only to be withdrawn and never rolled out.

This film which was made around that time, talks about the project. Project management was still very much in it's infancy. It is a time before PRINCE2 and MS Project, but the film illustrates that even before the age of the project, the same age old lessons apply.

These include:

"Dedicated project leadership rather than devolved responsibility", in other words the projects would have been better rolled into one programme, rather than managed as autonomous project streams.
"Lack of commitment" i.e. lack of governance and strong links back to the business via some Senior Responsible Owner. Too little stakeholder management. Too little ownership and courage from the business.
The "project was too complex", which combined with the lack of techniques, methodologies, and technology available, must have only compounded the problem. Milestones and gateways were not yet thought of, and although Henry Gantt invented his charts in the 1900's, the technology to create and update complex projects was not available until the late '80s.
Little or no management of risk, especially as the project was dependent on new ground breaking technology.

When BR abandoned the project, the technology was eventually sold to Fiat, who went on to develop their Pendolino trains which were sold worldwide, and eventually to Virgin for the West Coast line.

The original APT is now parked up at Crewe, in a siding next to Tesco.

Dont Shoot the Expert

2009-01-15T09:19:00.014Z

Yesterday there was a furore because a minister in the Department of Business mentioned the words 'green shoots'. For some reason, which is only known to the politarrati, this phrase is poison and should never be used. There are demons attached to it. It is akin to mentioning the name of the Scottish play. The Mail described the words as "a rose-tinted view of the crippling recession". It is a throw back to Norman Lamont, and the recession of the 1990's. Evidently if these magic words are uttered, then it guarantees that the recession will last an eternity.

The minister concerned was Baroness Shriti Vadera, an investment banker who was made a peer and brought into government to provide real business expertise. On the same day Mervyn Davis, stepped down as chair of Standard Chartered and was made a life peer so as to join the government as a Trade Minister..

Were Vadera's words really so explosive, or was it that she is an expert in a sea of amateurs, and that rankles with ordinary MPs. More experts joining as ministers is beginning to be seen as the thin end of the wedge.

Ministers after all are usually bods who have been plucked from the back benches and given the job as a favour. It's a British tradition, a good school followed by a good university is really believed to be enough experience to do any job. There have been around a dozen Labour Secretaries of State for Transport since 1997. Few of them know much about transport. See them here, now look at the UK transport infrastructure to see what effect they have had.

The current incumbent is Geoff Hoon who is a barrister. If I was in court I would not want a train driver defending me, and likewise if I was hurtling up the West Coast Main Line.........you get my drift.

The same principle holds true in our own world. Too often we have met with clients about a project recovery and have been introduced to the person managing the project. This is often not a project manager, but someone who knows a bit about project management and once went on a course.

In these trying times, the government is at least realising that we need experts rather than gifted amateurs managing our lives. Better green shoots than green ministers.

Happy New Year

2008-12-29T16:31:00.007Z

Who will be bold enough to forecast what will happen to the UK economy in 2009? As we have often recorded in this column, the economists and cityboys did not foresee the changes of 2008, and now predict more of the same but worse for next year.

Time to reiterate J.K.Galbraith's famous remark about forecasting interest rates: "There are two kinds of economists - those who don't know the future, and those who don't know they don't know".

However most corporates would agree that 2009 is a year for caution, for hunkering down and putting your business into survival mode. The CIPD are are forecasting a loss of some 600,000 jobs.

Redundancy for everyone is a gut wrenching experience, but adversity can lead to opportunity, and the beginning of the upturn often represents one of the best times for new startups. The big guys will still be clambering to their feet, feeling around and in 2010 still clinging to their 2007 products and services. Following the last recession in the mid 90's, there was a record 10% (1997) growth in the number of VAT registered businesses. (Find the stats here.)

Two notable examples are Innocent started by college mates: Adam Balon, Richard Reed, and Jon Wright in 1998, and Eat founded by Faith MacArthur and Niall MacArthur in October 1996. Eat now has 90 branches.

So 2009 will be a year for caution, but as Richard Branson writes in his latest book, Business Stripped Bare:

'The Brave may not live forever - but the cautious do not live at all'

Happy New Year

Good Bye Jaguar Land Rover

2008-12-22T07:31:00.003Z

A business model to produce goods that are so expensive that most people cannot afford them, is not a proposition that most financiers would consider worthwhile. Certainly not one that fits the current climate, but that is just what the Government is being asked to support with Jaguar Land Rover.

Quite rightly the Government did not bail out MG Rover, because theirs was a business model around producing goods that people could afford, but no one wanted to buy.

We are going through a period of unprecedented change, so swift that investors who put their money with the Wall Street guru Bernard Madoff are super rich one day and penniless the next. Clearly governments will have to take a much bigger role in business in the future, especially in the banking sector, but how far will State intervention go?

Jaguar Land Rover is the tipping point, if it is supported, then any other failing business will also be equally deserving of State aid. That means the prospect of many large businesses being effectively nationalised.

In the Eighties with the Thatcher revolution, we came to believe that nationalised coal, gas, railways, water and telecoms were an anathema in a free market economy. Look at those industries now. Do we really believe that we as consumers have benefited from competition?

We have wised up, we now realise following the banking crisis, that the banks could not care a fig about their customers. Any duty of care was abandoned like the clients in Mr Madoff's pyramid selling scheme. Indeed the bank's unfettered greed could have bankrupted us all, had not the Government guaranteed saver's deposits.

So does nationalisation look that bad? Well Hello Jaguar Land Rover.

iJournal Indicators 4

2008-12-11T07:30:00.006Z

As Homer Simpson might say "its just getting worse and worse".

Falling Indicators

The Pound is at parity with the Euro if you were thinking of exchanging your money for a holiday abroad this weekend.

economy

Travel on the tube, trains or walk the streets of London and there are a lot of stressed out people, fearful of losing their jobs.
Woolworths the original dime store is not worth a dime. Following the closing down sales 30,000 could lose their jobs. For a lot of people the fall back always was that they could get a job at Tesco. Not anymore.
Corus workers may accept a pay cut rather than redundancy. As prices are cut, interest rates fall to near zero, and now wages are cut, there is severe deflationary pressure. In Japan it took ten years in the 1990's to break free of deflation.
The accumulation of personal debt in the past few years has meant increased living standards, built on the back of rising property prices. The accumulation of government debt will have precisely the opposite effect. As the tax burden rises living standards will deteriorate and fall. It will be a very different country that has to come to terms with not getting richer. The growth of most businesses is dependent on increased living standards. So the most important challenge to business in the future, will be how do they adapt to this change.

Everyone is concentrating on Christmas, but its going to be a bleak mid winter, and that will just be the start.

Business Change - Some Questions?

2008-11-24T22:51:00.006Z

Of the three major change components in any organisation: people, process and technology, which is most important? We would always argue that for change to be effective we must address all three. But if we wanted to improve the organisation, by leveraging just one, which would it be? More and better people, better processes, or more and better technology?

For an answer, it is worth looking at where organisations fail. Just look at some well publicised events in the UK over the past couple of weeks:

The outgoing boss of the Royal Bank of Scotland, Sir Tom McKillop apologised for taking the bank to the brink of bankruptcy. Why? Well the reason given, was that the bank did not have the processes in place, to manage the risk of the toxic debt that they had incurred.

The BBC apologised for the Jonathon Ross and Russell Brand affair. Why did it ever happen? The internal enquiry found that the problem was that the editorial processes were not effective in preventing the offending programme from being aired.

In the 'Baby P' debacle at Haringey council, although the press are looking for heads to roll. The life of the infant could have been saved if the processes between government departments and local government had been joined up.

It is easy to blame process or technology rather than people, but there is a common theme here. Poor processes make poor organisations.

So is the corollary true? Do excellent processes make excellent organisations? Is an organisation with average people and average technology but exemplary processes a winning organisation?

Following a comprehensive analysis of all publicly traded US companies in all industries over the last thirty years, Harvard Business School professor McAfee and MIT professor Brynjolfsson think they have found the answer. Read about it here in the Harvard Business Review.

The upshot is that companies that spend more on technology, have a competitive advantage over those that do not. However the technology is not the component of change, just the enabler. Technology spend on business process improvement is the key differentiator between 'leaders and laggards'.

McAfee found that:

'Enterprise software like ERP and CRM systems, coupled with cheap networks, is allowing [these] companies to replicate their unique business processes quickly, widely, and faithfully, in the same way that a digital photo can be endlessly reproduced.'

'while standardizing some ways of working, they also encourage employees to come up with creative process improvements to outdo competitors' innovations.'

Process is king, and technology the enabler, but both are nothing without a spark of ingenuity from innovative people.

iJournal Indicators 3

2008-11-18T09:15:00.013Z

This is the third in a series, looking at the rapid change which is the current economic outlook. It's pace is even leaving the Bank of England behind the curve. This has meant an unheard of 150 basis points rate cut to catch up.

The US has taken the lead in the financial crisis so far, so lets look across the ocean.

Falling Indicators

US consumer sales fell 2.8% in October, the fourth straight monthly decline.

US import prices dropped 4.7% risking deflation.

US consumers are feeling much poorer, $20 trillion has been wiped off housing and stock assets. Consumer confidence is lowest since 1980.

In the US c'516,000 people are newly unemployed each week, by end of 2009 unemployment could reach 8%.

General Motors is essentially bankrupt. As early as 2004 their pension obligations were more than they could afford. If it were to collapse it would cost the US taxpayer $200bn. If GM goes, then recession will likely turn to a depression.

Rising Indicators

The American people elected Barack Obama because he represented a hope for the future

......... and in all the best Hollywood blockbusters, hope always triumphs over adversity.

Benefit Management: Avoid these 5 Common Pitfalls

2008-11-10T17:50:00.018Z

If we manage an IT project, then what we get is IT. If we manage an IT project which has some business outcomes, then we may get some business deliverables. If however we concentrate on project managing the benefits, we can create change, which may incidentally have an IT component.

The benefit approach to project management is simple. If we work through the benefits, we create value for the business and we make projects worthwhile and worth doing?

Traditional project management too often works against this simple approach. Here are five pitfalls to avoid:

Don’t Project Manage

When the idea for the proposed change was first conceived it would have been made up of two simple components: if we do this (the proposed project) then we can achieve this (the proposed benefit). Traditionally project management concentrates on the former, and neglects the latter. As a result the benefits are neglected and not delivered. So start by turning the mindset of the project on its head: we can achieve this (the proposed benefit) if we do this (the proposed project)

Don’t Lose the Reason for Being

We traditionally manage projects by manipulating time, scope and resources. Once the project is underway, we manage the project around these variables and delivering the project rather than the benefits, rapidly becomes an obsession. In our mania to ensure we deliver, we lose the reason for being.

Don’t Start with Business Requirements

The translation of why we want to do the project (the benefits) into what we are going to do (the requirements) is the most important, most difficult and most perilous part of any project. Too often business abdicates responsibility to the project team. The business turns its head and the benefits are lost. Start by ensuring the benefits map directly to the proposed project outcomes, that the proposed capability will deliver those outcomes, and that the business requirements are precisely tailored to create that capability.

Benefits = Outcomes = Capability = Requirements.

Don’t Leave it to the Business Case

Too often business benefits are buried in the dusty document that was used to justify the project. Ask any project manager about the Business Case and they will search their files online to find a document they probably were not even involved in producing. As a result the business case becomes the only document where the benefits were articulated and that is where the benefits stay.

Don’t End with the Deliverables

Just as projects should not start with the business requirements neither should they end with deliverables. The project is just one part of a change process. A project on its own cannot deliver benefits. However a benefit inspired project can deliver a propensity to change.

Most IT projects do not deliver. The latest research by Harvey Nash reckons the failure rate is 63%. The benefits approach to project management is certainly no panacea and organisations may not always get what they want, but as Mick would say, “if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need."

iJournal Indicators 2

2008-10-26T13:14:00.007Z

The first in an occasional series of iJournal Indicators is barely hot off the press, before we are obliged to make an update.

In previous recessions the media used to talk about the green shoots of recovery, but unfortunately these are still buried by the bad news. The iJournal barometer continues to fall.

Falling

World stock markets tumble to 5 year low.

Pound hits record six year low against the dollar.

Gordan Brown has admitted the economy is in recession. The latest quarter contracted by 0.5%. No boom and bust there then.

London cab sales were once the harbinger of recession. Sales have halved.

JCB moves to a four day week.

5 pubs a day are closing. The froth has come off the pub trade, high prices, low supermarket prices and the smoking ban are blamed.

BSkyB revenues hit by pubs and individual subscribers turning off.

John Lewis weekly sales are 7.6% lower. Waitrose is losing to Lidl.

Rising

BP third quarter earnings rise 83% on back of oil price fluctuations.

Stay tuned.

IT Projects Could Deliver Real Benefits

2008-10-22T22:58:00.017+01:00

In 2007 only 13% of the average IT budget supported innovation in business. The IT induced productivity gains of the 90s and early 2000s, have diminished significantly according to the accountancy based consultancy, PwC.

As we have reported before, the low hanging fruit of IT investment has been picked, and the spiralling cost of supporting redundant systems, under utilised hardware and the increasing need for more and different IT infrastructure and security, has sapped the muscle and motivation of most IT departments.

IT departments are now more the engine room of organisations, their role is to keep the existing systems running, rather than innovating new projects. This is reflected in the role of the CIO. According to research by Harvey Nash in the States, the position of the CIO in the organisation hierarchy is faltering. Harvey Nash found that in 2008 only 37% of CIOs sat on their company boards, compared with 47% in 2007.

The CIO is now fast becoming a geeky 21st century facilities manager.

In the PwC report "Why isn't IT spending creating more value", we return to the theme of how do we deliver value? Our answer would be through the management of benefits and by making business benefits the DNA of all IT project fulfilment.

PwC offer some priorities for CIOs to focus on:

Prioritise IT value management, focus IT investment on business processes that are sources of competitive advantage.

Manage out complexity.

Support innovation.

Picking the low hanging fruit was always mostly about automating static departmental functions, but as Bob Zukis the report's author explains, future benefits will come from harnessing the value of innovating end to end processes. That may be so, but it has been tried before with business process re-engineering and six sigma etc.

We do not disagree, but we think a fundamental shift is required around how we manage IT projects. Putting it simply we must turn IT project management on its head. Do not concentrate for example on the processes that have to change, but instead focus on the benefits the business want to achieve. Our approach would be to first articulate the benefits, and then research the outcomes that will deliver those benefits. Go on to analyse the capabilities needed to produce those outcomes, and then develop the requirements to build those capabilities. We call this the benefits approach to project management.

The iJournal Indicators

2008-10-21T21:17:00.007+01:00

As the fall out from the financial crisis rolls into the real economy, its scale and speed appears staggering. It's as if we are watching a line of dominoes falling in slow motion, one economic / business indicator tumbles and is the precursor to the next. We are watching a change that in the recession of 1982, took months and years to play out. Today it is being compressed into weeks and months.

Could a rapid downturn mean a fast turn around? Is there an upturn in sight, or are we falling off a cliff while trying to catch a falling dagger? o

In an occasional series we will be providing our own iJournal indicators, a barometer that will track rising and falling fortunes.

At the moment the barometer is falling, the iJournal indicators are loaded on the down side:

Falling

Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are reviewing their business models and shedding staff.
Ernst & Young has pronounced tht the UK is in recession. They forecast a week recovery in 2010.
Minor public schools are struggling and trying to join the state sector.
China growth slowing to 10.1% in the second quarter.
US unemployment at 6%. It was 7.5% in the downturn of 1992.
4566 British businesses are 'in distress' e.g. have outstanding County Court judgements.
BMW expects domestic sales to halve.
The first sovereign default could be Pakistan or Ukraine.
Website revenues are scrolling down. Their advertising funded model is under threat.

Rising

UK retail sales held up in August.
The inter-bank rates are gradually moving off their highs.
Warren Buffet is buying equities on his own account. "Buy when others are fearful, sell when others are greedy".

Stay Tuned.

No Hiding Place

2008-10-13T20:43:00.003+01:00

Older politicians like McCain probably just dont get it, but this video on YouTube has had nearly 7m views....

The change since previous US elections even the Bush vs Kerry election only 4 years ago, is that the millions raised for a presidential campaign cannot always match a personal campaign made available to millions.

Master Pie Makers of the Universe

2008-10-05T17:44:00.011+01:00

The biggest story of the week, the news that pies made by the pie makers of Melton Mowbray are now the only pies able to be called Melton Mowbray pies, was unfortunately over shadowed by news of a cabinet reshuffle and the $700bn bail out of the masters of the universe on Wall St.

Gordon Gekko famous for the quote in the film Wall Street: 'Lunch is for wimps', could never have tasted a Saxby's Pork Pie with Taylors Original English Mustard, but what do city financiers and economists know. Very little it seems, because up until this financial crisis most city analysts could only foresee what they knew from their past, the future it seemed to them was just a continium of what went before. Their knowledge was based on known knowns, but suddenly the financial collapse has put them in the Rumsfield territory of known unknowns and unknown unknowns.

The calumny persists, the Chancellor is still forecasting growth of 2.5% next year.

No one foresaw the financial collapse of the 1920's, or the Great 'buddy can you spare a dime' Depression that followed, but within ten years it would cause the rise of facism in Germany, and the second world war. No one foresaw this financial collapse but it will be no less severe. The tectonic plates of global power and influence will move, global and national economies will change, and that change will touch the lives of businesses and people everywhere. War and talk of war may follow.

Obama talks continually about change. At the Tory Party conference the theme was: 'Plan for Change', but for every politician and businessman, the biggest change in their lifetime is happening here and now.

All businesses are flying blind their knowns are unknowns, their unknowns unknown. Corporations would be wise to follow Gordon Brown and establish an economic war cabinet to meet twice a week to manage their response to the change. When the future is uncertain it is even more essential to learn from the past and respond immediately to the present.

Imagine A Facebook for Your Organisation

2008-09-22T20:28:00.002+01:00

How many people do you know in your organisation? If you work in a corner shop, then it is just about everyone, and it is likely that you know all your customers too. However if you work for a big organisation like Cisco, or Lambeth Council, or Revenue and Customs you probably know about one hundred people, and most likely those people will be concentrated around the location where you work and the business area you work in.

An ex-colleague, Andy Mulholland at Capgemini has just published a book called Mesh Corporations, about how within and around organisations, collaboration technology through blogs, social networking, and wikis (that name seems to be sticking) can bring people together to innovate, contribute, solve problems and find answers.

The book talks about the Network of Everything which is a neat phrase:

The Network of Everything is the web we now live with, a collection not only of the web pages that appeared during the initial era of the Internet, but video, instant messaging, VOIP, social networking, wiki-fuelled collaboration, and many ways of connecting both in real time and through time-shifted means. In the Network of Everything, you don’t just find content—you find new connections to people that lead to new relationships and problem-solving collaborations.

We know that in organisations we don’t work effectively in silos, so we try matrix management, but that is often one off and project specific, teams form and disband, relationships are made but then they wither. Work in modern organisations is transient, we work on many different projects, at many different levels, the organisation changes and morphs, people work with us and around us, and then move on, our relationships are transitory.

Life in organisations can be a frustrating experience, so perhaps if we could just integrate the network of everything with a network of everyone, a sort of Facebook meets the internal telephone directory, we could create a community with a bit more life as well as soul, and that would benefit the organisation as well as ourselves.

Financial Calamity: What Next?

2008-09-17T23:12:00.046+01:00

The idea that a butterfly flapping it's wings in the Amazon can create a tornado in Arkansas, is no where near as daft as the idea that a default on a mortgage in Denver can bring down the whole world's financial system, but that is what we are asked to believe.

However to understand how what has happened has happened, it is crucial to understand how banks literally make money. This item on YouTube was made a couple of years ago and is very timely, if you have ten minutes, it will change your view of banks for ever.

The dramatic events of the past few days, Bank of America made to acquire Merril Lynch, the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, the propping up of AIG, Lloyds merger with HBOS, and the faltering giants Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, are according to George Soros just the beginning.

He went on to comment that the financial sector will be severely mauled but could not be allowed to fail. In the end they would be bailed out by central banks, and then individual exchequers, leading to higher taxes for us all.

In the USA, the financial rocket ship of the past few years has meant that a relatively few financial companies, actually make up over one third of all America's corporate profits. What is the figure in the UK? Probably half? After all the City of London is the world's financial centre. So Gordon Brown is wrong, the UK is not best placed to weather the economic downturn, it is worst placed!

To hypothesize for a moment, the bailing out of financial institutions, combined with an enormous shortfall in tax receipts from financial profits, salaries, stamp duty and bonuses will hit government finances hard, at a time when there is precious little room for tax increases.

So what next? Well the Liberal Democrats at their conference today, ditched their old tax and spend policies and joined the Tories by embracing lower government spending. However it is already too late, there is now no choice, whoever wins the next election will have to cut spending dramatically. Unfortunately it will just be at a time when more spending is really needed to dig us out of recession. As a result the recession will be deeper than almost any commentator is forecasting.

As it turns out a debt in Denver, will over the next few years make changes to UK Plc, which are both unimaginable and unbelievable.

Benefit Realisation: 10 Questions for Your Organisation.

2008-09-07T17:36:00.012+01:00

IT projects remain the largest items of capital expenditure in many organisations, but following investment in Enterprise Management Systems, Supply Chain Management Systems, e-business, and Customer Relationship Systems, a lot of the low hanging fruit has been picked, and the trees are looking rather bare.

IT investment is still a vital artery for all organisations. That is why even during the current downturn there are still over 6500 IT project management vacancies currently advertised on Jobserve in the UK. The big challenge now, and it becomes even more important as recession looms, is how business extracts the maximum bang for the millions of bucks that have been spent.

In last ten years IT investment has come to rely on professional project management. Think back ten years if you can, and project methodologies, techniques and management expertise were still very much in their infancy in many organisations. We have come a long way since then, we can now be more confident that projects will not get screwed up even before they have been delivered. However what we cannot guarantee, is whether business will get a sustainable return from that investment.

If the last ten years were about project management, then the next ten years will be about value. How do we extract maximum return from minimum investment? How do we realise real benefits for the organisation.

Project Management is so yesterday, like financial management or marketing management it is now part of how organisations do business. In the next few years, organisations need to ask these ten questions about managing the benefits from IT investment:

1. Who in our business has the responsibility for ensuring that the benefits from IT projects happen?

2. Which of our Key Performance Indicators are about extracting value from change?

3. Does our capital expenditure process include plans about how IT and the business will manage benefits?

4. Do we have a mechanism for checking back to ensure that the benefits promised in the business case have arrived, i.e. what costs have been reduced, and to what extent have sales increased?

5. Can we demonstrate the connection between our IT investment and business results?

6. Do we know that $n IT investment will on average return $n x y business bottom line?

7. Do our project sponsors and stakeholders understand their role in turning gannt charts into profit.

8. Are Benefit Realisation planning and Benefit Mapping, mature techniques in our organisation? Is the Business Case a living document?

9. Does the value gained from past initiatives fund the development of new projects?

10. Are our IT strategy, change strategy and business strategy so aligned, that the benefits from one seamlessly flow to the other?

If you can answer yes to any of these questions, then welcome to the future.

No Meetings Monday

2008-08-07T09:01:00.004+01:00

In a new survey of managers, meetings were once again cited as their biggest time wasting activity. Jeremy Clarkson once described meetings as, 'places where nothing happens and nothing gets done'

As a rule, our experience would suggest the bigger the organisation, then the more time is spent by more people in meetings. Visiting government offices in Horseferry Road, London, there were meeting rooms on the first floor which were set out boardroom style, for what looked like sixty people! It is often thought that small organisations are brilliant and more successful because they are entrepreneurial, closer to their markets, and can adapt quickly, but their real secret is that without big meetings they just have more time to get on with the stuff that really matters.

It is time to rethink what meetings are for, and try to give them up. We need a national campaign: 'When a meeting is called, just say no'. There is great technology out there like Webex, but we just dont seem to have got to it yet.

So lets start small with no meetings on a Monday and see what happens!

Changing the NHS

2008-08-03T20:43:00.011+01:00

In a brilliant series a couple of years ago, Gerry Robinson looked at how to make change happen in the NHS. In his usual no nonsense style he explained how by looking for opportunities, and adopting simple ideas which were driven through with drive and persistence, big changes could happen.

His approach is summed here:

"I think there is a sense that somehow management is some kind of mysterious thing, and that when people, who don’t really understand management, come up with ideas, they think it might be the magic ingredient, whereas nearly every solution is something very basic, very straightforward, doing something that you already know, and whether it’s doing an extra shift or taking on an extra person or just slightly altering the way that you plan the day’s layout, all of those simple things are the things that make a differencep, but somehow people think that a change has to be some kind of magical solution, and it almost never is".

So it is such a shame that a recruitment advert in today's Sunday Times for a Head of Change Programmes at Redhill PCT shows that the NHS really does think that 'management is some kind of mysterious thing'. A few words from the job ad:

You will lead the development of the PCT's care model and pathway redesign to enable the delivery of evidence based high quality value for money services that meet local needs ensuring that there is alignment with the PCT's commissioning strategy goals and Practice based commissioning plans.

This just illustrates how even change has become institutionalised in the NHS, .......back to some common sense, Robinson discussing what has to change with the Chief Exec'of the NHS.

Nudge Nudge Say No More

2008-08-01T14:45:00.002+01:00

Richard Thaler was in town a few weeks ago, and politicians especially the Tories were seeking his advice on how to frame policy so that people can be prompted into changing behaviour, rather than the nanny state telling them what to do. Thaler expounds the theory of Nudge in a book he has co-written with Cass Sunstein.

A much quoted example, is changing the defaults around pensions policy, by automatically enrolling employees into company pensions, rather than asking them to join. The theory is that the inertia of changing and opting out is probably a stronger than having to make a decision in the first place, so set the default as being in the pension and that way more people would have pensions.

Traditional economics assumes that people take rational decisions based on all the information available to them, but advertisers know differently. Peer pressure and our wanting to fit into social norms are one of the most persuasive techniques employed by the marketing men. The decisions we make about most things are instinctive, and that is where a nudge and this new branch of behavioural economics come in.

The Tories are discovering that using these techniques could help shape public policy. For example rather than extol the virtues of going green why not just publish on gas and electricity bills, the average consumption of every house in your street. Wouldn’t that tend to average down fuel consumption? Why not link the colour of a car’s number plate to it’s exhaust emissions, green is good, yellow is OK, black is terrible. I know which one my daughter would buy.

5 Lessons in Outsourcing

2008-07-21T19:48:00.013+01:00

ETS, the American outsourcing company at the centre of the schools Sats test debacle, seems to be getting a severe caning over the exam chaos which has led to this latest government blunder.

It is now the end of term, and as yet a quarter of primary school pupils are still waiting for their results. Ed Balls the Schools Secretary has called for ETS to be expelled. As a result the Qualifications Curriculum Authority (QCA), who have overall responsibility for UK examinations, are this very minute locked in tense negotiations with their lawyers and the ETS lawyers.

Discussions about the future of the contract were "highly sensitive - legally and financially," Balls said in a written statement.

OK so lets just wind back a bit here.

The Sats testing is in chaos.
ETS are the only people who can sort out the mess.
The QCA are firing ETS

No it does not make sense, but no doubt there is not a lot of project and service management expertise amongst the academic and learned gentry of the QCA.

So some lessons on achieving change through IT and process outsourcing:

Outsourcing is not Out of Site Out of Mind

It's an easy get out for management, 'it's not our core business so we outsource', but it is a cost, and costs in any business have to be managed. Senior executives cannot assume that because they don't want to manage an activity, they can leisurely abdicate responsibility. Managing IT is complex, and doubly complex if the work is being done at arm's length. As an example, Ken Boston the Chief Executive of the QCA knew there were problems in March this year: "We are aware that the introduction of new IT-based improvements must carry risks, but we have mitigation plans to ensure delivery is secure". Risks have to be sorted before they become issues, and that unfortunately means rolling your sleeves up, and getting stuck in.

Get Your Own People on the Inside

Outsourcing is a partnership. The supplier will endeavour to get their people embedded in their client's organisation because this will ensure their multi-million contract can be leveraged for maximum profitability. So as the client reciprocate, get on the inside of their organisation, plant your own people, get the service provider to fund these posts, and rotate your people so that they do not go native. Listen to what they have to say, they are your ears and eyes .

Their Process is Your Process

Whatever the service being provided, crawl over all over it like a Nitty Nora the Bug Explorer. Get to know their processes, because these are your processes. The ETS contract is worth £156m of taxpayers hard earned, how do QCA know whether it is good value and fit for purpose?

Beware New IT Systems

During negotiation the new provider will claim that they have lower costs than competitors because of superior IT. That may be true, but don't under estimate the challenge of making their IT fit your requirements and processes. As Ed Balls is reported to have written earlier this year: "online systems, although they confer many benefits, are also subject to risk when first introduced". The clue here is the word first.

Pick Your Arguments Carefully

The QCA should have been advised to work with ETS to resolve the problems. Then when the term was over they could have collected the evidence, studied the SLAs, and then when they had sufficient confidence that they had a case, moved to terminate the contract. Outsource providers do this for a living, they have lawyers bigger than your lawyers, who are experts on their client's contracts, their SLA's and the international law that surrounds them. So don't pick a fight with the big boys in the playground, unless you think you can win.

Up to their Trotters in Slurry

2008-07-04T19:11:00.015+01:00

In a pleasant bar overlooking the Thames, people chat, drink and smoke. Plumes of cigarette smoke spiral up to the ornate high ceilings, but no one seems a bit concerned. How can this be? Dont they know there has been a smoking ban in pubs, clubs and bars in England and Wales for over a year now? The answer is that this is the Palace of Westminster, and MPs have cleverly excluded palaces from their own legislation, so members and visitors can puff away with impunity.

Between fags, MPs were no doubt discussing the news this week that ETS the American corporation brought in to oversee the Sats tests for six year olds, will be late delivering their results, due to computer and other administrative problems. Most politicians are outraged, auditing children's attainment levels is an important government priority .

Politicians are keen to scrutinise and monitor every aspect of our lives, including whether nurses can grin and bear it. Last Monday the government outlined legislation for a 'compassion index' to measure how often nurses smile, evidently it is an indicator of how caring they are. CCTV will be used.

Every scintilla of British life is now subject to laws, rules, regulations, league tables, surveillance, market force provisions, targets, internal markets, positive discrimination, political correctness, inspections, databases and audit.

Except that is last Thursday, when MPs voted to keep themselves immune from such scrutiny, by rejecting recommendations to provide receipts for money spent on their second homes. This includes the famous 'John Lewis list' from which MPs can choose items like plasma screen televisions, or like MPs Sir Nicholas Winterton and his wife, who claim as expenses the cost of renting their own house back to themselves, as part of their annual allowance provided by the taxpayer. Troughs, snouts and pigs immediately come to mind

In March we used the example of the MP expenses debacle to illustrate our second principle of change, and once again with this latest episode it confirms that:

People want to see change around them, but want to be immune from that change themselves.

MPs are willing to legislate that six year olds have to sit Sats tests, and to provide CCTV to ensure that nurses smile, but are not willing to have their own expenses audited, because they argue that it is too intrusive.

MPs do not recognise the public concern about being up to their trotters in slurry.

This illustrates our the third law of change:

Be complacent enough, and change will seek you out.

Light up and watch this space.

This is not Value this is M&S.

2008-07-03T20:12:00.009+01:00

Food shopping is changing, the value stores Lidl and Aldi are gaining ground at the expense of retailers like M&S, who it seems are living in the recent past if this commercial is anything to go by.

It never ceases to amaze how quickly people change, and how slow organisations are to react. Imagine meetings at M&S where directors and heads of, discuss whether to introduce a value food range:

"Dont be ridiculous Stephanie is M&S really going to show an ad with someone buttering a corn beef bap and eating pot noodles out of a jam jar"

Too late, yesterday executive chairman Sir Stuart Rose announced a 5.3% fall in like-for-like sales in the 13 weeks to June 28. In response shares tumbled 25% to 240p (670p last year), and the director of food Steven Esom departed, after the food division reported the worst performance in living memory, with a 4.5% fall in like-for-like sales.

Mr Esom, who was promoted to the board in March, is expected to receive a pay-off of around £550,000. He received a £500,000 golden hello when he joined the group a year ago.

5 Routes to Benefit Realisation

2008-06-26T21:30:00.018+01:00

With PRINCE2 it’s easy; once the products are delivered the project can be closed down, and even before the Project Evaluation Review is complete, the project team can disappear to the pub and celebrate another project in the bag.

The project may have been successfully delivered, but how can we ensure that the benefits will be realised. Here are five routes to benefit realisation, and surprise surprise, benefit realisation does not start when the project ends.

1. Start with the Benefits in Mind

Yes Stephen Covey got it right when he advocated beginning with the end in mind, as one of his Seven Habits of Highly Successful People. So it is with benefits. At the requirements stage or even before; dream a little: we want the project to deliver this, so that we can do this, so that we can achieve this. It is important to ensure that right from the start there is clarity, about how project outcomes are designed to deliver project benefits.

2. Ditch the Business Case

The Business Case is designed to justify the project, but too often towards the end of the project, the dusty document is retrieved to “see what the benefits were”. The benefits are the project, and should guide the process from beginning to end, whereas the Business Case is just a means to an end.

3. Tipping Point

A project should have three phases:

- Delivery of Outcomes
- Building Capability
- Realising Benefits

The delivery of products / stuff / outcomes should be the focus at the start of any project, but about mid way there is a tipping point, and the focus changes to how the benefits will be achieved. Each phase requires different disciplines, people, and management, but it is important that managing the present, morphs seamlessly into creating the future.

4. Get Out of the Comfort Zone

There is a view especially when delivering IT projects, that the IT project manager delivers the project (i.e. the delivery of outcomes) but the business is responsible for building capability and realising benefits. CIOs complain that they are too often sidelined by the business, but they do not always have the balls to get out of their comfort zone and declare that: “we have taken the project this far, now give us have responsibility for the business change”. After all it makes sense, benefits realisation requires meticulous planning, exceptional stakeholder management, and exemplary risk and issue management. The best and most experienced programme and project managers are usually in IT. (Discuss!)

5. Nail the Sponsor

Not wanting to cast aspersions, but some Senior Management are more keen to be at the start of a project than they are to be there at the end. Keep the sponsor committed and involved, clear strategic direction is required to turn project delivery into change.

Vote for Wiki

2008-06-25T08:00:00.006+01:00

The Guardian reports today that the Prime Minister is reading, We Think by Charles Leadbetter. At the heart of Leadbetters book, is the idea that:

" the web should be good for : democracy, by giving more people a voice and the ability to organise themselves; freedom, by giving more people the opportunity to be creative, and equality, by allowing knowledge to be set free".

It is to Brown's credit, that he must be one of the few politicians that is exploring the potential to use wiki to breathe life into democracy. (Wiki is the use of collaboration across virtual communities to create stuff. Wikipedia and Linux are well publicised examples).

Leadbetters ideas are outlined in this animation:

Think of the electorate as a crowd, now think about the wisdom of crowds. It's a silent revolution.

Mad Men Presenting Change

2008-06-02T19:41:00.010+01:00

In a couple of previous articles: 'Powerpoint: Shoot the Bullet' and 'Brown's Story Time' we have discussed how to present change. We have discouraged the use of PowerPoint and a hail of bullets on each slide, in favour of creating a change narrative to illustrate your words and emphasise a passion, enthusiasm or whatever for your subject.

In the last episode of Mad Men, there was a powerful and compelling example of what we mean:

Business Case or Benefit Mapping

2008-05-31T09:56:00.023+01:00

A recent survey of nearly 400 IT professionals on behalf of the Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA), found that nearly half the companies surveyed had recently cancelled an IT project before completion.

The reasons most often highlighted included changes in business requirements, and a failure to deliver the anticipated business benefits.

Our own experience is that IT project business requirements change by 5% a month. Once the project gestation period reaches nine months, then it is likely that nearly half the business requirements will no longer be relevant. So quite rightly, IT projects that are poorly managed and drag on, should get canned if they don't deliver before their sell by date.

What seems inexcusable however, are those projects that fail to deliver business benefits, because this indicates that as project managers we do not manage benefit realisation very well. What maybe happening is that we put too much emphasis on developing a business case, without properly understanding and planning how the business will make the benefits work.

Our reliance on the business case to justify a project should be open to question.

The business case is at the heart of any IT project or change initiative. The business case is important because it addresses the fundamental underlying questions:

‘Is this project worth doing?’

‘Are the outcomes worth the resources we are going to throw at it?’

‘Will we be better off after this project than we were before it began?’

‘What is the ROI?’

The business case addresses these basic questions by converting the resources required and outcomes delivered, into hard cash in order to calculate and measure benefit / return on investment.

However for complex IT change initiatives, whilst the business case is essential, it can be one dimensional, and ignore some important business benefits that are difficult to quantify. Accountants will no doubt be rattling their calculators in disbelief, but as an example, look at one of the biggest changes in retail banking.

The introduction of phone and Internet banking in the late 90’s happened at a time when the banks were rationalising their branch structure, so ROI was a no brainer: phone + Internet = customers managing their own account = fewer trips to local branch = fewer branches = less staff = lower costs. Hey presto, business benefits delivered

However there is a downside to this one trick approach:

What about the associated benefits that would flow from this change?

How are we going to ensure that these benefits are realised?

Internet & phone banking was not just about branch closure, that was just the financial justification, the real benefits included:

Convenience and 24 hour banking increased customer loyalty and with it an inertia to change bank accounts = less customer turnover.

Paper statements were no longer needed and could be phased out = cost saving.

Cross selling bank services: open a loan, a mortgage, a savings account or ISA and view all at once and move your own funds around between accounts = more business per customer.

Making plans to realise all the benefits of a change is just as important as fulfilling the business case, and benefit mapping is a logical start.

Benefit mapping is an important approach to managing the realisation of benefits. Benefit mapping creates the link between the project outcomes, the capability delivered and the benefits realised.

At iJourneys we use workshops to define these links at the business requirements stage. This is especially useful for example where a complex programme with multiple projects is delivering multiple outcomes with multiple benefits. Benefit mapping shows graphically the interconnection between the programme, the capability delivered and the benefits available.

This approach illustrates that delivering benefits is different from realising benefits. For benefits to be realised, plans have to be put in place to mesh with project delivery to ensure that benefits happen. As the project environment morphs into 'business as usual', it is crucial to understand that managing the benefit realisation is every bit as important as was managing the project delivery.

Gordon Brown and the Digital Age

2008-05-20T16:38:00.006+01:00

Gordon Brown is trying to appeal to younger voters and embrace the digital age by launching an online version of prime minister's questions. He has pledged to answer questions submitted as video clips, via the Downing Street YouTube website. Citizens are asked to send their videos to the Ask The PM sessions via the site by 21 June.

This hardly seems to embrace the digital age, surely a century and a half ago we could have written a letter with a question to Palmerston, stuck a Penny Black on an envelope, and sent it to London by stage coach and have received a reply in half the time.

Furthermore, does Downing St realise that a search for 'Gordon Brown' on YouTube returns this video first.

Now that really does sum up the digital age, as well as appealing to voters young and old.

Project Management: Just a Web of Promises

2008-05-17T23:33:00.019+01:00

Project managers love MS Project , gradually as all the project tasks are carefully mapped out, the project takes on a symmetry that gives the impression that the project will be completed on time, to budget and within specification.

However look carefully at the links between one activity and the next, and ask yourself why the person tasked with each activity should comply with your wishes? Why would often a complete stranger, complete your task, to time, to budget and within specification? The answer is because they promised you they would.

Now ask yourself: "How can I rely on all those promises to ensure that I deliver this project?"

Forget the Gantt Chart, the real basis of your project is just a complex web of promises. If just one promise fails, the whole project is in jeopardy. Projects are at their core just a flimsy amalgamation of assumptions based on fragile network of promises, made between yourself and your partners whether they be colleagues, suppliers, contractors, internal departments, outsourcing partners, or stakeholders.

Academics call this "promise-based management". Donald Sull and Charles Spinosa introduced the concept in the Harvard Business Review (April 2007). Their definition is that promise-based management is about cultivating and coordinating commitments to get things done in a systematic way. As project managers, it forces us to rethink how work gets done.

Sull & Spinosa maintain that good promises share the following attributes:

Good promises are public: In order for promises to be seen as more binding, promises should be made in public, remain public throughout the life of the commitment, be publicly monitored, and completed in public.

Good promises are active; There should be active conversations involving offers, counteroffers, commitments, and refusals.

Good promises are voluntary: Compelling people to comply with each and every request leads to less feeling of personal responsibility for the commitment. There should be space for counteroffers or even declines if the request appears unreasonable.

Good promises are explicit: Requests must be clear from the start, progress reports should accurately reflect how the promise is being executed, and success (or failure) should be outlined in detail at the time of delivery.

Good promises are mission based: The rationale is explained, and enough time is taken to be sure that the importance of the promise is understood.

However perhaps Peter Drucker got it most right when he wrote that:

"Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes... but no plans."

Unfortunately for project managers a promises is just a promise, it's commitment we are looking for.

The Apprentice Style of Project Management

2008-04-27T15:39:00.005+01:00

Is The Apprentice giving project management a bad name?

Five Tips on How to Break Bad Project News

2008-04-20T19:46:00.011+01:00

Following on from the Terminal 5 fiasco, two directors at British Airways were fired this week. Although Willie Walsh the airline’s CEO had declared in front of the cameras that: “The buck stops with me”, it proved the old adage: ‘that in times of trouble, deputy heads will role’.

To recap, more than 350 flights have been cancelled since Terminal 5 opened at the end of March. BA has lost an estimated 19,000 bags, most of which were driven to Milan for sorting. Many have yet to be returned to their owners.

Before the terminal opened, Walsh was ebullient, but by the evening when he had to face the cameras once again, he looked genuinely shocked. Could it be that this CEO of a major airline where safety has to be paramount, was not being properly and honestly briefed? If so then we should all worry, because if within BA there is a culture of concealment and complacency, then it is negligence bordering on irresponsibility.

That is why Gareth Kirkwood, BA's director of operations and David Noyes, its director of customer services, were forced to leave. Any of us who understand human frailty, can understand why these directors would wish to put a rosy glow on the briefings to their boss. It is after all, not career enhancing to be the bearer of bad news, but as these two directors have found out, a career can be abruptly curtailed when good news turns to bad.

As project managers we often have bad news to impart, and that gives us a dilemma: do we come clean, should we be ambiguous, should we procrastinate, or should we just gloss over it and continue to talk the project up?

So here are five tips on how to be the bearer of bad news:

No Surprises
Any impending bad news should be flagged as a risk while it is still on the horizon, and then flagged as an issue before it can escalate. Predicting bad news and alerting senior management of a future threat shows presence and foresight. Senior management will appreciate that managing bad news in advance, beats waiting for bad news and then managing it in arrears.

Forget the Blame Game

Watch the project manager on the losing team in The Apprentice try to shift the blame from themselves, to their team members. It is undignified, it is transparent, a fight usually brakes out and then chaos ensues. So forget the blame game, but this is not time for contrition either. The bad news is not just your fault, so stand your ground and apportion blame fairly, and make sure it is backed up with hard evidence.

It is Ultimately their Decision

It is a pain to maintain but keep a decision log. Then when the brown stuff is heading for a large whirring blade somewhere above your head, look back and follow the trail of decisions back to those senior decision makers. Then as the brown stuff hits the fan, gently remind them that this situation is a joint responsibility.

Follow the Prince

To quote Machiavelli’s, The Prince: ‘a prince [has] to have the people friendly, otherwise he has no security in adversity’. Build your network in the good times, and then fall back on it and seek support in the bad times.

Have a Solution

When the shock subsides, senior management will be looking for a solution, so be prepared with options and recovery plans.

It should be of some consolation to companies that when bad news surfaces, at least it indicates that they have an open and honest culture. As Michael Roberto, a professor at Harvard Business School points out: “Shoot the messenger one time, and it sends a horrendous message to everyone else."

Terminal 5 Postscript

2008-04-10T18:28:00.014+01:00

Willy Walsh CEO of BA, looked genuinely shocked when he announced to the press that: “we got it wrong” and “the buck stops with me”. A day earlier, just before Terminal 5 opened on March 27th he had been confidently predicting success. Even as passengers queued, and flights were cancelled, and as the baggage system crashed, Mr Walsh was attending a drinks reception with BA and BAA staff to celebrate success. Did he really not understand the risk of a cock-up?

It would appear our analysis was correct; the project tail was curtailed. Not only was there too little training of BAA staff, but the feedback from testing of both systems and processes was not applied. The project tail had been cut to meet a fixed deadline, so that there was too little time left in the plan to test, bug fix, retest, fix and retest.

Working with the Department of the Environment Transport and the Regions, back in the late 1990s, when John Prescott was the minister in charge, we were developing a bus timetable database, with the aim of creating an integrated transport infrastructure. (Don’t ask!) The project office in effect provided two sets of reporting, one was a Highlight Report about the real project, and the other was a much briefer ‘good news’ version for senior officials and ministers. In this version issues became challenges, setbacks became opportunities, and chunks of detail were omitted, so as not to over burden busy people.

It is well known in organisations that the brown stuff seeps ever downward, but what is less well known, is that too often only hot air rises. It is worrying that in an organisation where safety has to be part of the DNA, that Walsh is not properly and honestly briefed.

It was not just BA management that proved to be inept. In BAA, staff it would appear were just not prepared or trained. At BAA, the impressively titled: Head of People Solutions and Change, Veronica Kumar was responsible for that preparation. She was she said, trying to create a ‘nirvana state’ and had arranged employee engagement sessions where staff were given popcorn and asked 'Are you up for it'. However there was little real training.

Kumar summed up the situation: "Our policy has been to create a context for change, then to apply changes within that context". Few people, even those inside HR would understand what that meant, not least Willie Walsh who must be pulling his hair out.

Here Comes Another Bubble

2008-04-10T00:19:00.004+01:00

Blog, blog, blog .................................... pop!

Consumed by Change

2008-04-01T23:30:00.016+01:00

When this blog started last July, we pondered about political change, technology change, and climate change, but what was not on our radar, was a financial apocalypse. However, according to some commentators, it was about this time that the fall out from the rising debt from mortgages to sub-prime lenders in the States, was beginning to feed through to the hurricane that we now know as the credit crunch.

How is it then, that we did not see it coming? Listening to many management gurus such as Gary Hamel, Alvin Toffler and Rosabeth M Kanter, who preach the need for organisations to recognise and respond to change, it is easy to think that our own organisation is different. We are told often enough about how excellent, for example Google is at leading and responding to change, but we know that they are a phenomena who do wacky things. Their staff play softball at lunchtimes, and spend 20% of their work time developing their own new ideas. Surely if an organisation is well established with a tried and tested business model, then responding to change is important, but not an overiding priority.

The cover of the Bear Stearns last Annual Report proudly boasts: 'Eighty Three Years of Profitability'. With revenues of $9bn, and assets of $359bn what could possibly shake such a venerable financial institution; but eighty three years in business was destroyed in less than a month. Exposed as a holder of sub-prime mortgage derivatives with insufficient collateral, the bank collapsed. In response, the Fed quickly organised a fire sale to Morgan Stanley, and the bank was unceremoniously dumped at a fraction of it's 2007 value.

For Bear Stearns change was swift, but it can be slow. So slow in some organisations that it is like boiling a frog, the world is changing, but the organisation cannot or will not adapt.

The Royal Mail has a unionised workforce stuck in the seventies, a management stuck in the eighties and competition that is 100%, 21st century.

The letters business has declined, due to email and online billing, and their competitors are mopping up the business around e-commerce home delivery e.g. in 2007 the Royal Mail lost an £8m contract for second class deliveries for Amazon, because it could not reduce it's costs. It is being consumed by its own lack of success, to such an extent that Royal Mail executives fear that the pension fund trustees could put Royal Mail into administration to fund a £3.4bn deficit.

Meanwhile management and unions are at a standoff over plans to close their final salary scheme, and industrial action is planned. The slow decline continues.

Whether change is flash fry or slow burn, change is a grilling that all organisations cannot ignore.

Terminal Chaos

2008-03-27T23:34:00.010Z

The chaos at the opening of Terminal 5, is an example of chopping off the project tail, to spite the project end date. It was obvious from the scenes on the T5 concourse today, that there had been: too little system testing, too little load testing, too little integration testing, too little staff training, and very little staff familiarisation.

What do these activities have in common? These are the tasks that make up the tail of any project. If a project is running late and the end date is fixed, then the solution is obvious, cut the tail, curtail as many of these activities as possible and instead, let your customers do your testing for you in a 'live' environment, while your staff get 'on the job training'.

Cross your fingers and this may just work, you may even just get away with it, but generally what you get is a wobbly bridge, or a Millennium Stadium opening where most of the VIPs spend the evening trying to get into the venue. Risks are not dry statements in a risk log, they are the embodiment of Murphy's Law and as we have seen at Terminal 5, once the project tail is chopped, then anything which can go wrong will go wrong.

BA executives will this evening be consoling themselves that they have got the worst behind them. However project risks don't go away, they become issues that have to be managed and that's where Murphy's second law comes in: 'Smile, because tomorrow can only get worse'.

Powerpoint: Shoot the Bullet

2008-03-17T21:20:00.019Z

Unless you are David Cameron or Barack Obama, or have the time to rehearse for days, few of us can stand up and present without relying on PowerPoint, but for the audience facing up to yet another endless array of slides, the presentation is up there along with performance reviews and junk mail as one of the banes of corporate life.

Everyday up and down the country, hundreds of presenters are laboriously using PowerPoint as an autocue to read out loud thousands of bullet points, or as Russ Ackoff puts it:

“Overheads, slides and power point projectors are not visual aids to managers. They transform managers into auditory aids for the visuals”

Ackoff maintains that PowerPoint eliminates the need for the presenter to think, and so the speaker is seen as an obstruction, standing in the way of what is being projected.

So often technology is an enabler, but the invention of PowerPoint has eroded our communication skills when engaging with an audience, and yet communicating is what we do everyday.

All communication is persuasion, and persuasion is about changing minds, so an equation for change can be expressed as: Change = Communication + Persuasion. So how then can we make communication work and engage with an audience, but still use PowerPoint.

1 Tell a Story
Make the presentation illustrate your narrative, and instead of using the slides as the autocue, use cue cards or write notes on the back of your hand.

2 Free Yourself from the Presentation
Let the slides reinforce your words. Stand back, be persuasive, don’t rely on the slides, get your audience to understand why you are excited or anxious or delighted or whatever….. just engage.

3 Shoot the Bullet Points
Use just a few words on each slide or a few words and a striking image. Listing the benefits does not make the sale; the sale was made or lost by the second slide. Seth Godin recommends six words per slide and no more.

Now to make the point, imagine the Barack Obama "Yes We Can" speech as a Powerpoint!

View Upload your own

(The slide deck above is from Shmula.com)

Proving: Communication - persuasion = no change.

Principles of Change

2008-03-02T11:23:00.012Z

A CEO of a major corporation calls the IT help desk,

“I cannot get email on my BlackBerry”,
“Yea, the Exchange server is down” comes the reply,
“When will it be fixed?”
“Dunno probably today, might have to be tomorrow”

Later that day the CEO calls the IT Director,

“Can you let me have the expense returns for all the people in your department for the last six months, delivered to my PA by the end of the day?” Surprised the IT Director asks why?

“Well in my experience” the CEO replies, “if a department is poorly managed it will show up in the management of expenses”

That little vignette was published in the FT last week, and it was a story that should have alerted our members of parliament, who have spent the past few weeks trying to defend the indefensible; their allowances and expenses.

MP’s profligate spending came to light with the revelation that MP Derek Conway had spent £12,000 a year, plus bonus, employing his son as a researcher. His son who was at university at the time did not do any work as a researcher. Peter Hain who is also under investigation regarding undisclosed donations whilst running for deputy leader of the Labour Party, paid his 80 year old mother £4000 for looking after his Christmas card list. Malcolm Jack, the clerk of the Commons, nominally responsible for overseeing MPs' expenses, spent £100,000 on redecorating his grace-and-favour residence. Michael Ancram the Tory multi millionaire spent a £22,000 housing allowance having his mansion in Pewsey repainted and the moss removed from his lawn.

The solution, so the MP’s thought was to establish an internal enquiry chaired by the Speaker, Michael Martin. This enquiry would report in the Autumn, so no rush there then.

However last week it was revealed that Speaker Martin, was claiming £75, 000 for a mortgage he did not have on a constituency home in Scotland, and £4000 on taxi fares for his wife to go shopping. As Martin Bell, the former independent MP and anti-sleaze campaigner, said: "If you live free in a grace-and-favour home, you shouldn't need public help to run your second home."

Suddenly the airwaves were full of old duffers trying to defend the Speaker, and justify his and their own allowances. The media was blamed, one MP justified their expenses because they were only paid £62000, and not £500,000 a year like corporate directors. PM Gordon Brown said that Martin was a “very very good speaker”. What obviously they saw most at risk was this practice of policing their own affairs.

If our CEO had suspected something similar on his watch, he would want it independently investigated by the end of the day, and letters of resignation on his desk by the next morning.

It is astonishing that MPs spend every day legislating, changing the lives of ordinary people, but as soon as change is suggested in their own domain, then the reaction is to quickly bury the idea within some privileges committee.

However, it aptly demonstrates the iJourneys second principle of change:

People want to see change around them, but want to be cocooned from change themselves.

So what then is iJourneys first principle of change? We wrote about that in our first ever blog, and again it is illustrated by the behaviour of our MPs. It is that as change effects us, whether it be climate change, cultural change, technological or political change, we in turn try to make other changes to restore equilibrium.

So the first principle of change is:

“Everything must change, so that everything remains the same”.

The purpose of this blog is to discuss change, it is not a political blog, and therefore it is not for us to pass comment on MP’s behaviour. Unfortunately therefore we cannot say what arrogant, greedy, dishonest bastards they all are.

Wi-fi at The Cock

2008-02-25T18:02:00.011Z

The roll-out of wi-fi to Starbucks stores, is proving too much of a success. Managers report being taken over by the “new-Beduin”, the growing army of nomadic workers who equipped with laptops, and mobile phones are taking up residence, and colonising tables for as long as five hours a day.

Whitbread were one of the first businesses to spot the potential of coffee shops. Whitbread traditionally big in pubs and brewing, successfully transformed their business into hotels and coffee, with the development of the Costa Coffee chain during the late 1990’s. Since then the rise of the coffee shop has almost mirrored the decline of the traditional pub.

The local TV news popped into my local, The Cock last week. The publicans’ lot is not a happy one, the cost of hops and barley is pushing up the price of a pint, which when coupled with the smoking ban, is pulling down takings.

As Whitbread predicted, traditional pubs have now been in decline for many years, and although some of us love them, it would appear that most people would prefer a can, or a glass of wine on their own, on their own sofa. It’s as much about social and cultural change as it is about the price of malted barley.

We wrote a couple of weeks back about changes in the work place, and how the office may well become the exception rather than the rule in future organisations. Now rather than working at home, workers are going out and hitting the local hotspots.

Its not only coffee shops, travel around the country and walk into any hotel foyer, again it will be full of nomadic workers, meeting one another or just catching up with calls and email. This is a huge niche market which is taking off and ready to be exploited. So publicans, put wi-fi into your pubs, provide good coffee, good food, and the odd glass of wine and once again the pub can be the centre of the community, an on-line community that is.

Campaign Trail

2008-02-24T10:54:00.006Z

The Barack Obama campaign in the States is built around that one word: change.

It is extraordinary that change in the political sense is seen by voters as such a winner, but when change is mooted in organisations, it is seldom welcomed with the same enthusiam. Nimbyism, (Not In My Back Yard) is part of the reason, we clamour for political change, but when change affects us directly, then hang on a minute. It’s as if we want to see change around us, whilst being cocooned from that change ourselves.

The Barack Obama campaign is probably the most sophisticated of modern times, anything that makes the Clinton team look turgid, just has to be brilliant. Furthermore , Obama provides a lesson that any CEO considering major change should take on board.

In most organisations, when a change programme is announced, there is often too little information, followed by an awful PowerPoint presentation from the Head of Department, and an arid drip drip news flow that frustrates the hell out of employees. No CEO would sign off such a campaign to market their own products to customers, so why be so inept at marketing change internally.

Make change a campaign and use all the marketing tools that would be used in any consumer product launch: market research, focus groups, promotional activity, PR, advertising, and use those tools and that communication to launch change within the organisation. People in organisations also need change that they can believe in, before they will get out of their own back yard and vote for it.

Take Your Dad to Work

2008-02-10T11:21:00.001Z

In the States some organisations now have a ‘Take Your Parents to Work Day’. If you work in an office and your mum or dad worked in an office, would they notice any difference?

Looking back to the fifties, sixties and seventies, it really was 'Life on Mars', no computers, no internet, no email, no mobile phones, and yet without this technology remarkable projects were conceived, executed and delivered: D Day - the biggest logistics operation ever mounted, the National Health Service – part of the introduction of the welfare state probably the biggest cultural change of the 20th century, Apollo – man on the moon with the computing power of a calculator, and Concorde – the one and only supersonic airliner and a design icon to boot.

As your mum and dad look around the 21st century office, if the PCs were stripped away, it would still actually look pretty familiar. Less Brylcreem (‘a little dab'll do ya’), no smoking Rothmans (sponsors of the 1972 Olympics team!), and no tea lady ringing her way down the corridor with Smiths crisps, Wagon Wheels and Opal Fruits. On the surface then little change, but scrape beneath, and the culture and the way organisations organise work now, compared to thirty years ago is almost unrecognisable.

Last month the last deep coal mine in South Wales closed, it was the Tower Colliery, Hirwaun. The miners had taken back the colliery from closure by buying it back with their redundancy money thirteen years ago. When it closed it was like revealing a time capsule buried for thirty years, the pit canteen even sold chewing tobacco, but talking about their work, the miners revealed a sense of pride, satisfaction and community which has been all but lost in most modern organisations.

Organisations then were much more like communities, management wasn’t sophisticated but it was paternalistic, jobs were for life, there was little staff turnover, people lived close and worked where they lived, they were friends at work and watched their team play together on a Saturday. They drank together in their own social club and played cricket, and football in Sunday leagues. They married one another and their kids followed them into where they worked, generations were bound together by one organisation. They were a tight knit community, there were not layers of professional managers and specialists, work was organised in a way we would now define more as a self managing team.

Now however, the factory is no longer next to the office, but more likely in Asia, the design team can no longer be found in an office with ‘Design Department’ on the door, and customer support is not the Gas Board shop on the High Street but a call centre in Quadalupe.

Management is now about managing interconnectivity. We wrote a few months ago about the project management big bang, but management generally is experiencing its own big bang, as it grapples with managing the interactivity of ever dispersing activities and people. For example, this week we learnt that Premier League clubs are thinking of playing their games at different venues around the world, giving up Old Trafford and the Emirates Stadium, for well the Emirates. The very idea would have been thought of as heresy just a few years ago, but Premier League football is big business, and business is now increasingly virtual and global.

No wonder employees have now lost that sense of community. According to the 2006 CIPD Engagement Survey, over 70% of employees do not feel engaged with their organisation, and that sense of distance from where we work has been growing incessantly over the past twenty years.

So when our kids take us back to where they work, what will we see? On the surface it may look familiar, there may still be desks with screens, but scratch beneath the surface and the management of the organisation will have changed by an even greater order of magnitude. If current trends continue, our organisations will be a virtual tangle of interconnected activities, happening in real time, anywhere around the globe and beyond. So what is our future in organisations?

The age of the employee will likely fade away, and our son will take his parents down the garden path to a shed, open the door and point to his laptop and say “This is where I work Dad”.

Olympic Games: Council Tax Threat

2008-01-18T17:37:00.000Z

Honestly, this site is not obsessed with the London Olympics, but in London this week, the newspaper stands were shouting the headline, ‘Olympic Games: Council Tax Threat’. So on behalf of our reader, we delved into the story in more depth, and surprisingly it turns out that this is not another funding oversight, but a project assumption which turned bad, and now poses a new project risk. So yet more project drama from our very own Eastenders.

Project assumptions are one of those sections at the back of Project Briefs and Initiation Documents, that nine times out of ten include some bland statement like:

‘Assumption: That all project resources will be available throughout the lifetime of the project’.

This surely must be the most widely used get-out clause for project managers anywhere; because no way is it a valid assumption and quite frankly, it is stating the bleedin’ obvious.

So thumbs up to our Eastenders, the Olympic Development Authority in Stratford east London, for award winning risk management.

The 'Council Tax Threat', concerns an estimated £1.8bn, that was thought could be recouped from land sales following the London Olympic Games. This £1.8bn figure, was based on an ASSUMPTION that land prices in Stratford would continue to grow at 16% per annum to 2012. The land sale would then be used to payoff lottery grants and London council tax payers. However, following the credit crunch, it looks like this assumption was more than a tad optimistic, as it is now estimated that only £800k will be recovered, leaving a £1bn black hole in the Olympic rings.

To be fair, the assumption was probably sound given the rise in London property prices, but that was then and this is now. When project assumptions no longer hold true they become a project risk, and as soon as risks become apparent then like George Micheal they must come out. Even if that means rotten headlines in the London evening papers.

In summary, a reasonable assumption was made, followed by some excellent risk management, but unfortunately it means that London council tax payers will have to pay more, and the lottery will be short of money for good causes; but in project management terms a gold medal goes to those Olympic Eastenders.

Put Shell to Your Ear and Listen

2008-01-05T18:42:00.000Z

The Christmas blog "Email from the CIO" was meant to be a spoof, but spookily about the same time, according to a leaked email published in The Times, Jeroen van der Veer, the CEO of Shell was writing to staff about plans to sack 3000 people and outsource the IT function.

It would seem that speaking management gibberish is a skill that many CEO's will have to master as the cold winds of recession begin to breeze around corporate corridors. As Jeroen explains, outsourcing IT is "an excellent example of a function driving towards top quartile", "as Shell's businesses implement their strategies to achieve 'More Upstream, Profitable Downstream' and [be] top quartile, there has been an equal drive in the functions as well"

In other words clear your desks and goodbye.

The London Olympics is a ‘Live’ Project Management Case Study

2008-01-02T12:54:00.000Z

Students of project management should train their binoculars on east London and watch what is going to be a lively and living case study. The London Olympics is a project that will unfold before our very eyes, and what we will see, at least for the project management geeks among us, is going to be a lot more amusing and instructive than the games themselves. Throw away those PRINCE2 manuals, and watch the real EastEnders.

The first lesson in this Olympic marathon (Olympic Rings a Triangle) was about the risks of overblown project requirements when working to a fixed timescale. We learnt that it is essential to squeeze the project scope early; otherwise costs will be heading for the high jump.

That was lesson one, but what we saw last month in the latest episode, was a masterclass in the art of project appraisal. The drama moves from a muddy site in Stratford, to the House of Commons where Tessa Jowell the Olympics Minister is briefing the MPs on progress and the latest Olympic budget. Tessa is very much the matriarch, the Peggy Mitchell figure, she has not a lot of understanding about how finance works, and like Peggy she is a little naïve. Peggy believes that Phil makes loads of money from a garage with two mechanics, a snooker hall that we have never seen, and a pub which barely has more than ten customers. Tessa believes that the Olympic budget will remain at £9.3bn because she has been told it will.

We join the drama as Tessa who is playing the part of a Programme Manager is briefing the stakeholders, which in this scene is the Commons. As this is a soap and not real life, she gets away with just presenting a brief summary of the project costs, there is no real explanation of how the costs were derived, what the costs mean, what assumptions have been made, what the financial risks are, or any meaningful detail of how the costs e.g security, are broken down. Indeed the £2bn running costs of the games are not even mentioned.

Beware; any real Project Board or Steering Group would rip these numbers apart. Politicians may get away with it, but the best advice is to be transparent from the start. The client will have set the parameters of the project, so be upfront about the risks and don’t hide behind the technical vocabulary of the consultants and experts that briefed you.

As an example, here are a few lines from Tessa’s script:

“The answer is that contingency meets risk and, no, it’s not certain that the whole contingency will be drawn down but the chairman of the Olympic Development Agency is absolutely right: we will only be clear about that once the Games are over but the probability assessment which confirms the robustness of the budget gives us ground for optimism that not all the contingency will be used.”

So that’s alright then, we will not know the real costs until the project is over.

It’s a wrap….. queue music, and roll the credits.

Email from the CIO

2007-12-16T11:05:00.000Z

Hi

At our New Year awayday in Nice, I would like us to workshop why our departmental equity is driving south, and lets see us demonstrate some out of the square thinking.

We all need to be on the same page on this, I have noticed a few water cooler moments, and I think we would all acknowledge that there is an elephant in the room, but this is an opportunity for us to draw a line, and take these issues off-line. Yes of course blue sky thinking, that should be taken for granted, but we should also drill down and do some bottom fishing. I know it’s a big ask but I think we should swallow the frog, and be prepared to shoot the puppy.

My concern is that we are behind the curve. We really need to push the needle on this one, and I’m talking about going north. It will require a paradigm shift, a sea change, we need to get our ducks in a row and knife and fork it, the solution is not just about adding water.

Next year we need to get everyone on board, touch base and get maximum buy in. Its not rocket science so let’s be prepared to kick butt, give those desk jockeys a shake and hit the ground running.

Let’s agree no more clichéd thinking, we need to jump that shark.

See you on the Riviera

R

CIO

That was meant to be an end of year spoof, but running it up the flagpole and reading it back, it sounds quite motivational…………… or perhaps not!

A Happy Christmas to all my reader.

Olympic Rings a Triangle

2007-12-04T14:41:00.000Z

There is a project management triangle which links cost, time and scope. For example increase the scope of a project and it will take longer, and as more resources are added then the cost will rise. Try to deliver the project more quickly, then costs will either rise or less will be delivered or both. It is a simple equation, but one project managers experience everyday as they try to juggle: cost, scope and time, and keep the project stakeholders happy. However when one of corners of that triangle is fixed and immovable, for example the end date, then the project becomes even more problematical , and as the end date approaches the problems can only escalate.

In the summer of 2012, London will host the Olympic Games. The London Olympics will become Britain’s highest profile project. National pride and international credibility demand that that the games open on time. Time waits for no Olympic's project manager; it’s fixed solid, so if the Olympic project were to deviate from plan, it can only go in two directions: pay more or do less.

At the time of the bid, the cost of the London Olympics was guaranteed by Tessa Jowell, the then Culture Secretary at £2.4bn. However following the bid the figure jumped to £4bn, (it was an easy mistake to make…..VAT had been forgotten, and 2004 prices had been mistakenly used rather than an estimate of future prices!). Since then however costs have continued to creep up quietly and stealthily, to the current level which is now at £9.3bn.

It is not just the costs that are bloated; the scope of the project which is managed by the Olympic Development Authority is bulging as well. The stadium will have 55,000 seats that will be thrown away, the media centre (£130m) is destined to be the size of Canary Wharf laid on it’s side, two large student halls of residence on the Olympic site have been demolished to make way for a £2bn Olympic village.

Why build a stadium? We have a new stadium at Wembley that can be converted to track and field. Why build a media centre? Instead why not just rent Olympia, or the O2 Arena for two weeks. Why build an Olympic village? There will be plenty of student accomodation free in the summer of 2012 all over London. These are not particularly innovative solutions, but there has to be an alternative to just throwing taxpayers money at an ever growing wish list. As any project manager will tell you, if these requirements are not reigned in now, it is not just the cost that will overrun, time will fly out the window.

There is another lesser known law of project management which involves the gestation time of elephants, there comes a time when however many elephants you throw at it, the gestation time remains the same. This is a project that will demonstrate that we are either the best project managers in the world, by opening the Games on time and at a reasonable cost for a two week event, or that we are the worst.

Brown's Storytime

2007-12-03T23:43:00.001Z

Change was the mantra delivered continuously in speeches by Gordon Brown when he first became Prime Minister back in July. In one speech after another he is said to have repeated the word 'change' over one hundred times. Change or no change, since then his demise has been faster than a falling dagger, as he has become beset by a series of scandals involving incompetence, dishonesty and sleaze.

As one calamity has followed another he has come in for unprecedented criticism and not least for bringing a lack of vision and direction to his new job.

Following Brown’s first Queens Speech, Vince Cable the Liberal leader’s verdict was that:

"The Queen’s Speech has been long in anticipation. The Prime Minister has been waiting for it for 10 years. He has had a 35-year political career distilling many of the ideas that have come forward today. He postponed the election in order to inject more vision, but the sense of anticlimax is deafening. We have heard little new, no ideas and little vision. Is that really what we were waiting for?"

It is a familiar theme, as Gordon Brown emerged from the Commonwealth Leaders Conference in Uganda last week, he muttered to reporters the need for long term decisions, and not ducking difficult decisions, but what long term decisions? What difficult decisions? Just like his mantra for change, the message was incoherent.

Certainly Brown’s vision is not just blurred but blind, however it goes deeper than that. To articulate change successfully requires not just a vision, but also a narrative. Change is a journey (excuse the cliché) with a beginning, middle and a goal, and change whether team change, business change, or organisational change, requires a storyline that can engage people. The role of the narration is to link strategy and action, and provide a picture that illustrates how ideas, concepts, people and processes and projects are interconnected and somehow intertwine towards a common purpose.

Picture People Process Project. At iJourneys this is the method we use to develop just such a narrative. Working with the people involved with the business change, we use wall sized graphics to create a storyboard to illustrate the change scenario, and picture the process from idea, through project delivery to reality.

Robert McKee, a former Professor at the University of Southern California is the screenwriter's screenwriter, famous for his 'Story Seminars'. In an article in the June 2003 edition of the Harvard Business Review, he described how there are two ways to communicate business change. The first is by using conventional rhetoric, which is what most politicians and business people rely on. He describes this as an intellectual process, which in the business world usually consists of a PowerPoint presentation to an audience, followed by some Q&A. The alternative is to persuade people, which is ultimately far more powerful because it fuses: the vision, the idea, and the what has to be done, with purpose and emotion, and the best way to do that is by telling a compelling story.

Gordon Brown has been making up a lot of stories lately, but now he must write one about the change he wants to make and he must do it quickly.

Don't Confuse Documentation with Communication

2007-11-27T00:16:00.000Z

With England failing to get into the European Championships following defeat by Croatia, there was a brilliant display of collective abdication of any responsibility from the FA Executive. That was despite having appointed and sacked three England managers: McClaren, Vennables and Eriksson in just over a year, and having paid out around £7m in compensation.

However, £7m fades into insignificance when compared to the Wembley Stadium debacle, for which the FA was responsible. The stadium was completed in 2007, four years late and hundreds of millions over budget. The Aussie builder blamed late delivery on the Football Association’s changes in specification, but “We just asked for seats, toilets and a pitch”, a FA official responded in exasperation.

When IT projects run over budget and time, it’s an old favourite with project providers to blame scope creep. Projects are late because the client gets it wrong, and asks for more and different stuff. The client on the other hand, acts the innocent bystander. We just wanted a simple: Criminal Justice System, Tax Credit System, or National ID Card. For many clients, once the project provider has been appointed that’s the job done, and they can walk away from the difficult bits with a sigh of relief, and resume the comfort zone of the day job.

The project has barely kicked off, and already there is little understanding on both sides. So if you are the Project Manager stuck like a referee on the centre spot, for goodness sake do something, because your project is late before it has begun, and it will soon get down to penalties!

As most IT projects progress, it is often just a few key business users that have the knowledge and the clout to make the important decisions that will pivot the project between winning and losing. As Project Manager it is essential that you keep these big players fully informed, by circulating lots of project documentation: Project Initiation Documents, Requirement Spec’s, Change Logs and the rest. These people however, as you will very quickly discover, have a business to run, and their first priority is business as usual, so how much time do they have for your emails and those enormous attachments?

To paraphrase Tony Blair, getting projects right is all about: Communication, Communication, Communication.

PRINCE2, MSP and other methodologies encourage the production of lots of documents, but too often we confuse documentation with communication, we circulate but don’t communicate, we email but don’t empathise.

The maxim is:

If you send me a document I may read it.
If you discuss the document with me, I may understand it.
If you let me create it with you, it’s mine.

That's why at iJourneys we are big advocates of co-creating solutions in project workshops, but more importantly combining those workshops with technology. Today with collaboration technology, the workshop does not have be a talking shop that ends in a pile of flip charts that nobody reads:

Try using wall size graphic templates to enable everyone at the workshop to participate and get involved. The design of the graphics should ensure that all outcomes are captured in a structured format.
Transfer the graphics online so that all the workshop participants can view the pictures, and comment, discuss, edit and continue to collaborate online.
Invite other stakeholders to the site and get their views and input.
Let the project team collaborate, coordinate and sign off actions online.
Collate the agreed output, download, and only then create the project documents. Some of our tools even automatically populate standard PRINCE2 reports, so with some brief editing the job is finished.

Workshops may be time consuming, but developing a close understanding between the project provider and the client has to be time well spent, and although workshops may be a lot of effort, they really can ensure a level playing field.

Will Wiki Work

2007-11-15T23:02:00.000Z

The internet has the potential to enable us to come together, and create virtual teams to collaborate on projects from across cyberspace. In the previous article, we learnt that the term being given to this type of collaboration is: Wiki.

Free from the constraints of organisations, virtual communities or Wikis, harness the web, to harvest the talent and organise that talent to potentially create the project teams of the future.
This promise of a free market of free spirits that can reach out across time and space and come together to build things and make money is compelling, but where is it happening, who is doing it right now?

One site that is trying to jump start the revolution is Elance, a virtual meeting place where currently around 38,000 virtual providers are vying for just c’ 3000 virtual projects. These are not grand projects, for example there are 1100 virtual administrators looking at 36 admin opportunities, this is not nirvana, but big trees, small acorns etc.

Linux and Wikipedia are the big examples of open-source collaboration, but both are very different, Wikipedia engages thousands of contributors, whereas Linux was built by a few talented and enthusiastic experts, and this is more the Wiki model.

Read Andy Oram he gives the example of the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) peer-to-patent project, in which volunteers sign up to search for ‘prior art’ that can invalidate an application. The USPTO are regularly flooded with applications, and peer-to-patent have 1,611 volunteers, but as Andy points out: ‘you don’t want 1,611 people examining each patent. You want 20 people who understand the subject deeply and intimately’. He has coined the term ‘micro-elites’ for these specialist groups, in our terms they are the project teams of the future. So now we just need to find a Programme Manager, is there a Buck Rogers on LinkedIn?

Doing it for Themselves

2007-11-14T23:49:00.000Z

The old management structures (existing in most organisations), were all about command and control, about creating things, and replicating them efficiently. That is how value was created, but now increasingly creating value in organisations requires imagination, creativity, and different thinking. Processes like manufacturing are now outsourced, no longer do corporates strive to make the cheapest widget, today that widget must be better designed, and have more and better unique features than its competitors. That is the value add, and that is why organisations require innovation and creativity.

Read any employee engagement survey and they will show that only around 29% of employees are actively engaged with their organisation i.e. actively contributing to corporate outcomes. The other seven in ten people turn up, but leave their intellect, innovation, and creativity behind, they just do their job. They have no real motivation to bring these qualities to work.

What is amazing, is that most people are creative and innovative, as an example just look at the millions of blogs being written every day, the vibrancy of Facebook, the vitality of MySpace and the thousands of pictures and movies being loaded daily onto FlickR and Youtube.

Garry Hamel in his new book, Future Management has been exploring just this paradox:

"Turns out that in an age of wrenching change and hyper-competition, the most valuable human capabilities are precisely those that are least manage-able. Nerve. Artistry. Élan. Originality. Grit. Non-conformity. Valor. Derring-do. These are the qualities that create value in the 21st century. Self-discipline. Economy. Orderliness. Rationality. Prudence. Reliability. Moderation. Fastidiousness. These are the human qualities modern management was designed to foster and reward. No wonder most organizations are less resilient and inventive than the people who work for them.”

“One can fairly describe the development of modern management as an unending quest to regularize the irregular, starting with errant and disorderly employees. Increasingly, though, we live in an irregular world, where irregular people take advantage of irregular events and use irregular means to produce irregular products that yield irregular profits.”

He recommends a management revolution within organisations, but also looks outside the organisation for solutions:

“We have for many decades been living in a “post-industrial” society. I believe we are now on the verge of a “post-managerial” society, perhaps even a “post-organizational” society. Before you start hyper-ventilating, let me assure you that this doesn’t mean a future without managers. Just as the coming of the knowledge economy didn’t herald the death of heavy industry, a “post-managerial” economy won’t be entirely free of executives, supervisors, administrators and overseers. But it does imply a future in which the “work of management” is less and less the responsibility of “managers.” To be sure, activities will still need to be coordinated, individual efforts aligned, relationships nurtured, objectives decided upon, and knowledge disseminated. But increasingly, this work will be distributed out to those on the periphery.”

By the periphery, Hamel is talking about how the internet enables virtual teams to morph, connect and collaborate, more like organisms than organisations. The development of open source software is a prime example. Thousands of software developers are not only working on projects for their employers, but are also collaborating within communities of developers to create software, usually open source software, for example: Linux.

This software is not just being developed in their own time, but via the web in their ‘employers’ time too. Talented individuals who are not particularly fulfilled intellectually or financially at work, are now doing it for themselves. Technology is enabling networks of professionals from around the world to come together and collaborate on stuff which interests and motivates them, and they do it for fun as well as profit. It is as if the traditional corporate pyramid management structure is suddenly sprouting new shoots, like a Christmas tree on steroids.

It is what Professor Mark S Shoate calls: Wikis, in his new book, “Professional Wikis: Collaboration on the Web”. In the book he contends that future endeavours will be created like the online encyclopedia: Wikipedia, by content delivery and information sharing on the web.

This movement will require it’s own networks & infrastructure, a sort of a mixture of Facebook, LinkedIn and eBay, where suppliers and customers meet and trade on the web. If you think about it, it could be the next big killer application, and some bright entrepreneur is going to make millions.

Alternatively perhaps we could get together and Wiki it for ourselves.

Project Management Illustrated with a Tree and a Swing

2007-10-27T13:23:00.000+01:00

The journey from vision to reality can be a difficult one, and it is neatly summed up here:

Click on the picture.

Thanks to Juha Saarinen

The Project Management Big Bang Theory

2007-10-21T18:45:00.001+01:00

The latest report from the Standish Group (2006)estimates that 46% of application development projects in the US are ‘challenged’, meaning they either fail to deliver results on-time, within budget, or within scope. The Standish Group have been collecting these numbers for over ten years now, and the numbers do not change very much, it’s usually about half of all projects that fail, and the numbers are likely to be the same in the UK.

The usual suspects: scope creep, inaccurate forecasting, lack of visibility, and lack of skilled resources are the same reasons that have been trotted out now for the last ten years, so why havn’t they been fixed, why do projects continue to be challenging?

All the excuses are valid, but they ignore the very nature of projects: IT projects are designed to self destruct.

All projects start with a big exciting idea, and based on that big idea, the client, stakeholders & IT project team create a big picture describing the change required, and out of that big idea, IT describe how the system build will support that change.

The project team then get to work, and a time bomb under the project is activated, a faint tick is audible as the project plan begins to break down the work, and that tick grows louder when to make the project more manageable we start to break the big picture down into smaller and smaller pieces.

The business analysts are away consulting with the business; the infrastructure team are away considering the hardware and engaging with suppliers who are talking to their suppliers, who are talking to their suppliers. Security and quality teams are now involved and the network team are away talking to different suppliers and the application development teams are distributing the work to other different teams, some in the UK and some abroad, some onshore and some offshore, some work is an internal build, some development will be outsourced, some bespoke, and some packaged.

We have just taken a beautiful big picture, turned it into a jigsaw, and shaken the box.

For the project manager it’s like sitting on time bomb, the clock can be heard ticking, and any moment the project will self destruct and the jigsaw will explode. The role of the project manager is now not so much to guide the project to a successful conclusion, but more to try hang on to all the pieces.

It’s only when the project is fully dispersed in tiny pieces do we start to try to rebuild the whole from the sum of the parts, and this is where those cost, time and scope overruns start to creep in, because surprise, surprise, too often too many people have not seen the big picture, so they have built their own piece of the jigsaw, and however much we hammer the pieces they will not go back together.

One lesson here (for there are many) is communication, all the teams should know and understand the whole, and be very clear how their bit fits, and how it interacts with all the other parts. As project managers we have got to find ways to keep the whole team (and that’s everyone) aware of that big picture.

Unfortunately this is not taught at project management school, and the Bible of project management in the UK, PRINCE2 makes barely a mention of it. In fact PRINCE2 and other project management methodologies, describe projects as a linear progression, akin to God building heaven and earth, i.e. start on Monday by developing the specification, start the build on Wednesday through Friday and implement on Saturday, to be followed by a day of rest on Sunday.

This biblical explanation of evolution was believed for thousands of years, but replaced by the big bang theory, and so it is for IT projects, the project management big bang theory states that projects self destruct, explode and hurtle ever outwards, until a god of a project manager grabs the pieces.

Another Try

2007-10-16T22:02:00.000+01:00

The turn around in the fortunes of England rugby is it would seem, a prime example of Ackoff at work, because whatever followed the 36-0 defeat by South Africa in the Rugby World Cup, led on to a complete turn around in the way the coach Brian Ashton and the team approached the tournament. Exactly what changes were made, and how they were made, will no doubt emerge, but whatever happened, the radically new approach led a side that were all but written off, to wins against Samoa and Tonga, then a brilliant win against Australia in the quarter finals, followed by the gruelling triumph against France in Le Crunch semi-final.

Someone at the meeting between the coaches and the players that followed the defeat by the Boks should have reminded them all forcefully, that there is no point putting lipstick on a pig, or to quote Ackoff, even when we try to put the wrong thing right, it can only become more wrong, but when we make a mistake doing the right thing and correct it, we become righter.

"Therefore, it is better to do the right thing wrong, than the wrong thing right".

So do as England did, dig deep, swallow your pride, admit you have got it wrong and only then will it come right.

Getting it wrong is all too easy so I am grateful to the FT for publishing the attached, with thanks to the psychology department of the University of Pennsylvania:

Q: What is the secret of your success?
A: Two words.
Q: What are they?
A: Right Decisions
Q: How do you make a right decision?
A: One word.
Q: What's that?
A: Experience.
Q: How do you get experience?
A: Two words.
Q: What are they?
A: Wrong decisions.

Counting Down

2007-09-22T13:20:00.003+01:00

This picture was taken in April this year at St Pancras Station, the future hub for Eurostar rail services into Paris, Brussels and beyond. When the first Eurostar pulls into St Pancras on 14th November 2007, this will be the culmination of a 10 year project.

Construction projects may be different, but IT projects often have a Pareto style 80-20 rule at work: 80% of the work is done in the last 20% of the time available. So what better to focus the project team and the business, than a giant countdown display like the one in the picture at St Pancras. Not only does it display the days, hours, minutes and seconds to the opening of the new station, it also displays a big message which says we are confident, we 'can do', and we deliver on time.

IT departments need a bit of pizzazz, they can be lack lustre places to work, whilst the sales managers are on route to a conference in Marbella, the network engineers are fixing routers in Morecombe, whilst programmers pour over Java script, the ad agency pour Java and script the next commercial, whilst data administrators enter tables, account managers entertain over table d' hote. IT need a big message which says we are confident , we 'can do' and we deliver on time. So why not get one of these big counters, the bigger the better and locate it where all the project teams can see it, choose the most complex and high profile programme, calculate the end date and set the counter running.

IT is so often maligned because business doesn't really understand what the geeks do. Systems are like sausages, no one really wants to know how they are made, but a giant clock could restore the IT crowd's credibility in a tick.

When the technical architects say it cant be done, point to the clock and tell them to find away. When the project team are flagging, tell them that if they meet that date, they will all be on there way to somewhere that makes Marbella look like Morecombe. When the client asks to just fit in one last change, tell them to stop the clock if they dare. When the CEO proudly announces the latest results, point at the clock and tell them how IT played their part.

Spam Sandwich

2007-09-20T17:07:00.001+01:00

This week we have seen the government bailing out the Northern Rock bank. As customers queued for hours outside their local branch to get their money out, branch managers could be seen trying to form orderly queues, handing out paperwork and taking abuse from tired customers.

The same managers were also no doubt getting hassle from staff worried about their jobs, as well as grief from senior management who could see their share options fading away. However, to what extent does a company car and a free parking space, make up for being a middle manager squeezed like spam in a sandwich between company and customer, fat cats and staff, and between the boardroom and boredom.

In a recent poll of MBA graduates, few wanted to be managers, “change agents” or “catalysts for change” were thought to be much sexier options. Read any book on change, and rarely are managers mentioned. The middle manager is seen as dispensable, a bit of rusty plumbing between the decision makers at the top, and the people that do the work.

‘Letting go’, the neat euphemism for losing layers of executives is the investor friendly way of saving money. There is no risk, the Board can be sure that there is no way there will there be disgruntled managers picketing the executive washrooms. Managers know the score; once they have been promoted from the pack they become the easy prey of the big beasts that prowl the corporate corridors.

Organisation charts are like rich seams on a coal face, ready to be hacked at and mauled over in the name of corporate restructuring. For any CEO studying the layers of little boxes on an organisation chart, it is like a TV game show:

“I’ll open that box please, Bob”

“OK Mr CEO lets see what you have got. Yes, you could save yourself £100,000 a year and a BMW 5 Series”

“I’ll open another box please, Bob”

“It’s another winner Mr CEO, £80.000 a year and a BMW 3 Series.

All the boxes are winners and middle managers are quickly selected and buried like a terracotta army. A no-brainer for management consultants such as McKinsey, whether centralising, decentralising, divisionalising, off-shoring, on-shoring, up-sizing or down-sizing, it’s all cash in the attic.

However for the executives left behind, their fate is almost worse, they are the ones who must see the change through, not permitted to whine and moan like other staff, they must maintain a loyal enthusiasm and a positive attitude, and be careful with whom they gossip, relaying mindless FAQs in their master’s voice, to a staff who have lost total respect. Spam never tasted this bad.

After advising on restructuring for decades, now even McKinsey are admitting this approach doesn’t work. Short term gain maybe, but a long term pain in the neck. The latest McKinsey research shows that:

‘although CEOs often maintain that structural reorganisation is the quickest way to address poor performance. McKinsey analysis shows that when struggling global companies embarked on major restructuring initiatives they did worse ,on average, than underperformers that made no structural change.’

So what makes organisations perform well? Again to quote McKinsey:

‘To find this holy grail of management studies, a McKinsey team analyzed upward of 100,000 questionnaires to uncover the practices of 400 business units in 230 companies around the world. The team eventually arrived at one winning combination: clear roles for employees (accountability), a compelling vision of change (direction), and an environment that encourages openness, trust, and challenge (culture). Nothing else came close in improving organizational performance, and what’s more, the study found that organizational and financial performance correlate directly’

“Open the box, Mr CEO”

“No Thankyou Bob. For a change I'll take the money”.