Rescuing Failing Projects: Strategies for Turning the Tide
A failing project doesn’t necessarily follow the same pattern each time. And it’s not always blatantly obvious that the project is failing. After all, project struggles are to be expected. There’s a real challenge within the New Zealand public and private sectors of knowing when a project is headed for failure and making the course corrections quickly.
No one wants their project to fail, but countless projects that have successfully delivered were at one point in time destined for failure. So how can we steady the ship and sail towards successful delivery and ultimately a good strategic outcome for the business?
In this article, we explore some different strategies that together could help.
Knowing the signs of failure
Projects and programmes are increasingly complex business initiatives. They involve different people, teams and activities. It’s hard without a proper governance and reporting practice to actually identify that things are not going in the right direction broadly for the project. Unfortunately this leads to projects hitting the rocks well before anyone is prepared for it. This means wasted time and budget, making it hard for that strategic objective to get moving again.
When there are reporting and communication processes in place that articulate the state of the project right from the start, it makes it much easier for early intervention. Like many things in life, getting to a problem earlier makes the job to fix it much smaller. We’ve rescued projects at different stages; take it from us, it’s far less stress earlier in the piece!
There’s more than just the time and money at stake that makes visibility of warning signs so important though. Being an organisation that demonstrates the ability to both identify and fix problems quickly can give leadership and delivery teams much greater confidence in the project’s likelihood of success. This is great for motivation and momentum. You want to avoid a situation where the delivery team has been raising the flags for months before the steering group or leadership intervenes with a fix.
Doing a project health assessment
For many, there could be an overarching sense that the project isn’t going well, but there’s an inability to precisely identify where, how, what and why. That’s where a project health assessment comes in. Our sister company IQANZ specialises in quality assurance. As part of this IQANZ developed a project health assessment that takes about 3 minutes to complete. The result gives a % chance of success, suggestions for areas of improvement and an optional longer report.
Back to basics – reestablishing project goals
If we refine the point of a project to its very essence, it’s about bringing positive change for the organisation it exists within. Over the course of a project when stakeholders, budgets, technologies and other factors enter the equation, there can be a risk of things getting overly complicated. That’s why good project management backed up by strong governance is so critical. It keeps a north star in place for the project throughout different stages and challenges.
If you’re finding a lot of grey area and conflicting agendas within your project that are blowing out time and budget, it could be time to reinforce why the project exists. Consider:
- Confirming the project scope and objectives to all stakeholders
- Identifying the areas that have crept in that are distracting or slowing progress and call them out.
- Ensure that the milestones and final deliverables are very clear for the business to understand.
- Put steps in place to remove roadblocks the delivery team is facing that are irrelevant to the finished product or change.
- Get stakeholders all back on the same page. It’s common for different expectations to evolve across the business.
- These can derail things without careful management and continual reinforcement of scope and goals.
To an outsider, it might seem obvious that revisiting the original goals would be a logical strategy to bring a project back on the rails. But to actually do this does require a firm commitment to communicate regularly, redirect efforts and even slow down teams or individuals that may have veered off course.
Rebuilding the team and responsibilities
When a project is headed for stormy waters, every aspect of the project should be assessed closely. Change within a project team can be turbulent, but they’re also sometimes part of the puzzle. Reasons for rebuilding the project team might include:
- Reducing the number of ‘#1 priorities’ for certain or all team members.
- Freeing up subject matter experts to add the most value to certain areas.
- Moving important but less advanced tasks to junior team members.
- Empowering capable senior team members to help drive problem-solving and stakeholder discussions.
It’s important to be deliberate and considered with changes to a delivery team. For many projects, a reimagining of the team’s responsibilities and tasks doesn’t have to feel like the major undertaking it can sometimes be perceived as. Think about bringing the team along for this journey and accurately frame it as change that can not only help progress the project but also make everyone’s daily work lives better.
Sometimes changing things up within the team could be bringing in particular knowledge from across the business into the delivery team to help. It could also mean hiring an external contractor resource that will quickly unblock things.
Repairing stakeholder relationships
While we’re working on business and government initiatives, people are a permanent factor in the mix. Ask any project manager that’s been in the game for a while, and they’ll likely have a story about difficult stakeholder relationships.
The reality is that while there are simply ‘difficult’ personalities that exist in business, it’s far more common for tension points to be the result of conflicting KPIs or communication breakdowns. We’ve seen first-hand tricky stakeholders become dedicated advocates of a project when the hard work is done to get everyone on the same page.
If you’re experiencing a project headed for failure, take stock of all the stakeholders in play. What and with whom are the hardest conversations? Is there an aspect of the transformation or solution that continually creates conflict? These are important to get resolved, even if they require support from the steering group. What’s left over could be strained working relationships that often benefit from empathy and honesty.
Remember, stakeholders unlock progress through their buy-in and sign-off. Good working relationships aren’t just more pleasant to navigate, they keep projects on track.
Split up milestones into shorter, manageable chunks
We’ve long been proponents into segmenting projects down into well-defined stages that don’t last too long. When the business is left waiting months or even years between milestones, there’s less to celebrate and bigger stakes to worry about. By creating more, shorter phases of the project the business can reap many benefits, including:
- More moments of ‘wins’ and achievements
- Precise control over budget and resource against progress
- Less opportunity for significant divergence from project objectives
- Put more pressure on the business to maintain good reporting and governance practices.
- Provide better clarity to the delivery team about their tasks and goals each week.
If you’re facing a project that’s headed for serious problems, it can be a great strategy to break up the remainder of the project into smaller sections. It will get more wins on the board sooner, and build momentum towards rescuing and successfully delivery. As the saying goes, there’s only one way to eat an elephant – not that we support doing that!
Report frequently
Status and budget updates can feel like standard project admin, but it’s really at the heart of successful delivery in many ways. When a project has a patchy road to the current state it’s in, a lack of visibility at the right times is often to blame. Making a resolution to treat reporting as a top priority will help greatly towards your rescue mission. In project terms, ‘no news’ is most certainly not ‘good news’!
