Last month I gave a presentation at the Nottingham and Derby branch of the British Computer Society about why projects fail – which, as regular readers will know, is a subject close to my heart. It was a pretty good evening: lots of people turned out, including some of the BCS Women group and some people who weren’t members at all, who thought I would be interesting enough to give up an evening for. I hope I met their expectations! I really enjoyed the event; even getting up the next morning before 6am to make my train to London wasn’t that bad. Bizarrely, first class travel was actually cheaper than second class – not sure how that works out – so I got a cooked breakfast on the train. But the next day the lack of sleep kicked in and I zonked out as soon as I got home.

If you weren’t able to attend but would like to see the presentation, you can download it here (355Kb .ppt file).

There’s a video in the presentation in which Deborah Hall explains five things you can do to steer projects along the path to success. You can watch the video below. It’s only 24 seconds long but it gave people a break from listening to me talk the whole evening.

{vidavee id=”12781″ w=”320″ }

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15% of all projects are shut down before they complete, according to Microsoft. There’s various different reasons for this, and companies should handle closing down projects with sensitivity. Here’s a video clip of me in discussion with Deborah Hall about stopping projects.

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I’m giving a talk in Nottingham next month.  It’s been a while since I’ve been that far north.  I always got really excited being driven through the town when I was younger, as Robin Hood could have been in the forest somewhere.  There’s been a recent TV series about him that I’ve watched with a degree of dedication normally reserved only for Un Dos Tres.  So it’s great to have a reason to go back there, even if this time I don’t think I’ll spot outlaws among the trees.

If you’d like to come along to the evening event, here’s what it’s about:

Projects are worth about £60 billion to the UK economy. Research shows that about 70% of projects fail. It doesn’t take a maths genius to work out that’s a lot of money at risk each year. As more and more of the routine IT work gets outsourced or off-shored, the UK is becoming a hotbed for projects. If you haven’t worked on one already, chances are you will soon.

This talk will cover how organisations define (or don’t define) success and failure in terms of projects. We’ll discuss the five main reasons why projects fail, and have a look at some examples of high profile projects that have failed to deliver. While no set of guidelines can guarantee project success, some critical factors will be presented to give your projects a fighting chance of success. And if you’re in the middle of a project that is going badly, we’ll look at some recovery strategies to bring projects back from the brink – including when the best option really is to cut your losses and back out gracefully.

It’s being hosted by the British Computer Society Nottingham and Derby Branch, at a local hotel.  You can reserve a place (it’s free!) and find out more on their website.

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Andrew Ball, head of IT Performance Audit at the Audit Commission, was one of the speakers at last week’s BPUG Congress. He spoke during a session in the strategic project and programme management strand about how to cope when projects go wrong.

The main thrust of his argument was trying to avoid projects going wrong in the first place by planning for failure. While that sounds a bit negative – after all, no one starts a project predicting it is going to be a disaster – it is actually all about constructive management of risk.

You can plan for failure through risk management, either at the very outset or as soon as you see the warning signs which Andrew identified as:

• Slippage
• A conspiracy of silence: no one speaking about project problems
• A big project board
• Lack of clarity of roles
• Organisational dissent, as that means people go off and develop their own solutions instead of using the product of the project
• Critical resource dependencies, where all the skill is in one or two key people
• An elusive solution that no one has really defined yet
• Lack of resources (money and people).

These are all risks that can be tackled head-on and taking action when you see the warning signs could stop a project failure.

Andrew also made a good point about the role that experts have to play in project failure. He warned that we should be wary of experts who cannot see the risks that others can. Subject matter experts, whatever their discipline, can become conditionally desensitised to risks in their domain. Just because something can be done does not mean it is easy to do. There is also the difference between a gamble and a risk to be considered: your expert may have the skills to do x, y and z but no one has the skill to throw six sixes with six dice. Luck may be on your side, but that is a gamble rather than a calculated risk. So beware experts who tell you the project will get lucky and it will all work out – other people may be better at clarifying the risks involved than those closest to it.

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I listened to Rich Maltzman talking about his forthcoming book Fiddler on the Project (co-authored with Ranjit Biswas) on Controlling Chaos, way back in July. We’ve been corresponding since, trying to find time to talk about project management and authoring. I finally got round to asking him some questions last week, and from the sounds of it, the Fiddler book is going to be a really interesting read for two reasons:

• it’s based on the story of Fiddler on the Roof, so it certainly won’t be a dry read
• it’s being written using a wiki, and the value of wikis in general is a part of Web 2.0 that I haven’t got my head around yet.

I asked Rich what prompted him to write a book based on the film/musical? “I’ve had a long career in telecom project management followed by developing and delivering courseware on the subject,” he said. “I kept running into situations which were so well described by the metaphor of balance. One day it occurred to me that the Fiddler on the Roof story would express this in a colorful way, one which many of the project management textbooks couldn’t because they simply are too dry.”

I’ve never seen the film, or the musical (although there are posters for it in the tube, so it must be on in London somewhere). Even without having the knowledge of the original story, Rich believes I could still appreciate his book. “We will provide the appropriate backdrop,” he said. “Still, your experience would be greatly enhanced if you knew the larger context and could visualize the characters and hear some of the music (which is excellent) playing in your head.”

So maybe I’ll be renting the soundtrack from the library then!

“The ‘wiki thing’ is still unfolding,” Rich said, when I asked him about how it was working out. “We are heading towards 100 responses and have had people debating the concept and mostly just cheering on the idea and contributing illustrative examples.” He gave me some ideas of other sites that might help change my Luddite view of why wikis are useful.

“I would recommend is that you listen to the HBR Podcast episode on Wikinomics, to learn about examples of how knowledege sharing has helped in industry so far,” he said. “You also may want to check out We are Smarter than Me.”

Rich and Ranjit describe the Fiddler from the film on their website:

He balances on the peak of the roof, perched atop the house, effortlessly keeping his balance with one foot on either side of the peak while producing beautiful, enchanting music – a melody that is an inspiration for the story’s main character, Tevya. The fiddler never fails – and he never falls.

I can definitely see the parallels with project managers: being caught in the middle, in a careful balancing act between various stakeholders. But ‘never falls’? I know of plenty of projects that fall, so I asked Rich for some advice for people working on projects that are failing.

“The Fiddler never falls, because he is an imaginary character!” Rich said. Unfortunately, in the real world things aren’t always that smooth. “Real projects often do fail, and real project managers often “fall” or fail. Advice for those who fail: get back up. It probably wasn’t your fault. Get back up there and fiddle.”

And for those who are struggling with projects that are teetering on the verge of collapse? “Go back to your scope statement, your objectives, and your assumptions,” Rich advises. “Recheck your assumptions, reassert your objectives, and don’t be afraid to ask for help from A Higher Authority. I don’t mean praying here, although that may fit, too. I mean your line of management, your sponsors, your key stakeholders. If you catch your fall early enough, you can regain your balance. But as you are falling – this is the tricky part – record what you are experiencing. It is this catching of “lessons learned” as you are correcting your fall, that will help you in future projects.”

Changing the mindset of project teams from ‘failure’ to ‘learning opportunity’ is a hard one, but perhaps if you catch it early enough and start to turn people around so they learn as the project winds up then the actual close down wouldn’t be so painful.

Hope I don’t have to practise that any time soon though!

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