What makes a project successful? Emanuel Camilleri in the book Project Success: Critical Factors and Behaviours has tried to answer that question. This book from Gower is the bible on getting it right, covering everything from the history of project management to managing information flow and organisational diagnostics.

The problem with a book on project success is that success means different things to different people. “[T]he perception of the stakeholders is fundamental to success,” Camilleri writes. He also points out the difference between project success (is the project a good thing) and project management success (was the project delivered in accordance to best practice). In order to address these, he has included bits of both in the book.

Project Success is based upon Camilleri’s literature research. He’s gone through academic papers since 1971 and looked at all the studies done into project success criteria. Then he has categorised them and ranked them by the number of times those criteria pop up in the research results. That gives us a list of the top things to work on to give ourselves a fighting chance of being successful. He writes:

“[T]he most important dimension for ensuring the successful implementation of projects, in order of priority, include:

1. Project Planning and Control;
2. Project Strategic Fit;
3. Project Scope;
4. Employee Commitment and Participation.”

These are the top four in a list of 11, and the rest of the book looks at each of them in turn.

The section on strategic fit is interesting. Whole books have been written about portfolio management and Camilleri has managed to squash project selection into 12 pages – and three of them are diagrams.

The book has plenty of diagrams, flow charts and even a scope definition template, but it still doesn’t feel like a practitioner’s book. For example, there are a few pages on assessing the project team environment and establishing whether it’s conducive to high performance. This is based on five measures:

1. Level of role conflict and ambiguity within the project team
2. Adequate definitions of roles and responsibilities
3. Appropriate level of processes and procedures
4. Level of collaboration within the team
5. Level of cooperation between the project team and external stakeholders.

Each of these measures is the subject of a flow diagram. The flow diagrams provide a scoring system which ranks your project team. I can see the benefit of this for consultants, people joining a new company in roles where they can influence the outcome, or (maybe) new project managers joining a new team and who want to know what they have let themselves in for. But practical, day-to-day use? I don’t need to score the team environment. I live it – I already know.

In some areas the book is very detailed. For example, there is a good section on knowledge management and information flow. There’s a worked example of a project with start and end time constraints which explains float and resource levelling. But lessons learned is covered in just 5 lines.

One of the reasons I believe this is not a practitioner books is because it widely draws on management theory and is often concerned with the organisational layer, such as putting in place relocation and termination policies for employees. While you could have some influence at an individual level, this is not something most project managers can do.

To be fair to Camilleri, it isn’t meant to be a desk reference for the struggling project manager. If you are studying project management, or working as a consultant for failing projects, then this is a must-have read. If you are setting up a project management function from scratch in your company, then you’ll find Project Success very useful for starting off on the right foot. But the working project manager looking for a guide to doing day-to-day things right would be better off investing her reading time in something else.

Buy on Amazon.co.uk
Buy on Amazon.com

This review first appeared in Project Tipoffs.

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Summer of Books 2011 continues with an interview with author Joanne Flinn.

Joanne Flinn is the author of The Success Healthcheck for IT Projects: An Insider’s Guide to Managing IT investment and Business Change, which I reviewed in February. I had the pleasure of meeting Joanne for coffee earlier this year when she stopped over in London for a short business trip. I caught up with her recently to talk about her book.

Joanne, your book is about giving projects the best possible chance of success by indentifying those that are likely to be unsuccessful. Why did you focus on that?

Failure is both predictable and preventable. Spotting potential project success (or failure) early so that the right things can done to keep it on track – so the team sees their hard work accepted and used – and the business users see the project as great. It requires curiosity and courage. Curiosity to enquire about what’s really going on and courage to face it.

The statistics say that 33% of projects go really wrong – that’s a lot of our work wasted (who wants that?) and a lot of investment down the drain (which business can afford this?). The book provides a healthcheck for projects that involve both IT and people and goes past the basics of project management.

It’s a very detailed book. Why did you decide to write it?

Not long ago I went back and did a mid-career degree at Oxford and HEC to keep my project and change management skills polished. I had to do a thesis – in researching my topic (what causes success and failure in large projects), it dawned on me that there was very little written on the topic that had the practicality of ‘what works’. Most approaches are over 20 years old and times have moved on. This gap was a prompt.

Was there anything else you noticed in your thesis research?

Working out just what failure was costing businesses and our reputations in technology was another prompt for the book. A third of projects fail dramatically – this is a lot of money and a lot of frustration. I hate being on the receiving end of a poorly rolled out project as much as I get frustrated being in a project team seeing it’s hard work pushed aside.

How did you get started writing it, after all your research?

Well, to share the human side… I had met a wonderful man and realized that the only way to know if this was ‘the one’ was to have time where we could get to know each other. He lived half way around the world from me – so I figured, let’s stop talking about writing, and write – and I went to the country he lived in, set myself up as a writer and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Wow! So you started over in a new country and a new relationship, with literally a blank piece of paper.

Writing – it was like beginning again. I had written lots in my past career (corporate reports, consulting documents and that thesis). I rapidly realised that the style I’d learnt was not the one to use for a book that was to reflect real life project issues backed by science. Even putting a personal touch in was a challenge – I’d been trained to focus on data – yet the data was saying ‘It’s about the humans!’

How long did it take you to write?

The book took me 18 months – 3 months doing the first draft. Which, yes, I did throw away. Nine months to write and another 9 months to edit.

Writing a book is a major commitment, but I have always thought it was worth it. What was the best thing about writing it?

The best thing was creating useful analogies and picking the best-of-the-bunch from all the great war stories I’d heard or been part of over the years. I also loved designing the structure and layout – it was important to me that the book was not a text book, but more of a book that a practitioner could dip into.

I think you managed to do that. I liked the bit where you focused on the risks of managing an out-of-the-box software implementation, which was very practitioner-friendly. What was the hardest part?

The hardest part was keeping disciplined to sit down daily and work on it. Closely followed by choosing to take three more months off work to get it completed. I realised that if I didn’t I’d be editing for years!

With all your experience and research on what makes a project a success, what’s your top tip?

Being real about the situation upfront – is the project funded to deal with all the unvoiced expectations? Be real – get them voiced! Later on… if people are going to have to do roles they feel ill-equipped for, factor in the productivity dip and proactively do something about it. This applies to the team as much as the business. We often know the reality, we just need courage to face it!

What’s next for you?

Getting diagnostics online at www.successhealthcheck.com so that sponsors and project managers or team members can do a healthcheck even faster than reading a book.

I’ve also been asked to speak at several conferences and love the nods of people saying ‘yes I’ve been there too’ when I share war stories (and the fact that at least 10% of projects, often the big ones are total write-offs) – and knowing there is a way out of the problem.

Thanks, Joanne!

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Rick Valerga’s new book, Projectegrity: Using Integrity to Make Your Project Great, continues the concepts he dealt with in The Cure For The Common Project. Projectegrity is integrity in a project environment—what it means, how you get it and what to do with it. It’s not that easy to say, but it’s an easy concept to understand.

Valerga bases his thinking on the idea that while we all have values and beliefs and (hopefully) hold ourselves to the highest ethical standards, sometimes in the busy world of projects we end up making compromises. And when we compromise our integrity, projects fail.

“Integrity involves being truthful at all times, avoiding deception, and acting ethically in all occasions, especially when no one else is looking,” he says.

Valerga discusses the five practices of integrity:

• Ownership
• Perspective
• Expectation management
• Alignment
• Engagement

Expectation management and Ownership were covered in Cure, and these are cited as the two most important themes. These two themes reflect things that managers can do to make sure that projects are successful. Ownership is the most important change to make internally: you must own the outcomes and activities on a project. Taking ownership means taking responsibility for your own contribution. Expectation management is the most important change to make externally: this is all about ensuring that project stakeholders understand the implications of the work that is being done.

The book is illustrated with nice Pictofigo images, similar to the ones Derek Huether uses in Zombie Project Management and on his blog, The Critical Path. Pictofigo is fast becoming the go to source for project management illustrations. I have used them in presentations myself.

“The best value a project manager can bring is to continually represent the ‘whole project perspective’,” writes Valerga.  By this he means that you should consider the project from the perspective of all stakeholders and adopt an ‘interested investor’ mentality. This gives you the distance from the detail and the ability to see the entire picture including what the project means to different people: customers, team and sponsor.

There are some overlaps with Cure. For example, the advice to make meetings more effective by announcing the dollar value of the cost of the meeting at the end is also explained in Cure. The suggestion to have an elevator pitch for your project is another point that is often made in management books of all kinds, and both Cure and Projectegrity discuss this.

However, Valerga does present some new ideas in Projectegrity. He discusses the use of financial models to help evaluate trade offs where the iron triangle of the triple constraint doesn’t balance. This was a new concept to me, and one which will appeal to the proposed audience for Projectegrity, those people who are involved in projects but not as project managers.

If you want a book that is not too project management-y for your executives and team members, then Projectegrity is a good option. It’s clearly written, with examples and anecdotes, in Valerga’s easy style. But if you are a project manager, you’d be better off with The Cure for the Common Project.

Read my interview with Rick Valerga here.

Buy on Amazon.co.uk (Kindle)

Buy on Amazon.com (Kindle)

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“It’s misleading to define project success in static terms, focusing only on the final delivery,” writes Thomas Juli in his book, Leadership Principles for Project Success.  In this book, he sets out a broader definition of success, although you have to wait until page 84 to get to it.

Project leadership is a hot topic at the moment and this book is part of the cultural evolution about what a project manger does.  It’s peppered with examples and Juli’s personal experiences.  Everyone loves a good story, and there are plenty in here.  The Leadership Principles referred to in the title are:

• Build vision
• Nurture collaboration
• Promote performance
• Cultivate learning
• Ensure results

The book has two major parts: the first explains and discusses these principles, and the second shows how to apply them at various stages throughout the project.

There’s a lot of common sense stuff, but then, if we all did what was common sense projects wouldn’t have half the problems  they do.  Juli admits that common sense is a key factor in project success, but also says that it alone is not sufficient and that “it takes at least one person to lead the pack.”

But what if you aren’t in a leadership role?  Juli has taken this into account too, and there is a good section with practical advice on what to do when you are not in charge and don’t, for example, have the influence to build the vision.

I did think that there are some paragraphs that could have been more tightly edited, and the book could have been 20 pages shorter with less waffle, but that’s not a serious criticism and you’ll still enjoy reading it.  You never know, we all might become project leaders with this sort of guidance, and that would be no bad thing.

Buy on Amazon.co.uk

Buy on Amazon.com

This review first appeared on How to Manage a Camel.

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By the time I was half way through the introduction I liked Todd Williams. I liked his way of thinking, his faith in project management and in people, and his ability to tell stories. I was sold on the idea of a book telling me how to rescue a problem project, even though I wasn’t working on one. Let the lessons begin.

Todd Williams’ book, Rescue the Problem Project: A Complete Guide to Identifying, Preventing, and Recovering from Project Failure, really does live up to its name. If you were ever in doubt about how to spot a project teetering on the brink of going ‘red’, then this is the book for you.

A five step recovery approach

Williams presents a five step approach to project recovery. The steps are:

1. Realisation: you must recognise that there is a problem before you can attempt to solve it.
2. Audit: carry out an objective project audit to determine the problems.
3. Analysis: analyse the data from the audit to establish root causes and begin to form the solutions.
4. Negotiation: mediate between the parties involved to establish an acceptable solution.
5. Execution: implement the recovery plan.

So, when you are faced with a project that has fallen off the edge of a cliff, should you stop it completely so that you can put this five step approach into action? Absolutely not. Williams recommends that instead of stopping the project, you should “slow the bleeding”. He writes:

To properly diagnose a system, it must be running. Stopping the project also stops the errant behavior and makes it difficult to find problems and their root causes… Although some situations may benefit from stopping a project following either the audit or the analysis, these are rare. A better approach is to slow the bleeding by implementing remedial fixes.

Whose fault is it?

When a project falters, the easy option is to point to the project manager and blame her. But is it really the fault of the project manager when it all goes wrong? Williams doesn’t think so—at least, he believes that there is more at play than just one person not doing a very good job:

Projects become red because they faltered under the guidance and supervision of the existing steering committee, project sponsor, executive management, and PMO. This group of executives has failed to identify and correct problems before the project fell into serious trouble…The project manager should be accountable for all that has gone on, but the project’s management should have checks and balances to minimise the chances of failure.

In some cases, the problem does not lie so much with people but with policies. Williams writes about a software development project where internal IT policies prevented the product from being tested on computers outside the company’s firewall. As a result, many bugs were missed, the deployment was a disaster and customers were unhappy.

Issues can also arise through poor methods, or poor application of methods. “The organisation’s project management philosophy may be a poor fit for the project,” Williams writes. In short, there are many reasons why projects fail. Analysing the reasons is important, but assigning blame to an individual or group of individuals is rarely the largest part of getting a project back on track.

I enjoyed this book because it felt new. I read a lot of project management books, and many of them—especially those aimed at non-academics—are not half as ‘new’ as this one. You don’t have to be working on a failing project to get some value out of Rescue the Problem Project, because the case studies will help you avoid getting to this position in the first place. But if your project is troubled and constantly reporting a status of Red or Amber, then get your hands on a copy now.

Buy on Amazon.com

Buy on Amazon.co.uk

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