Matthew Theobald
Keywords
Engagement, Lessons learned, Project management, Project team, Risk management, Significant variance
Working with partner companies to define, execute and deliver a clinical research project can be a challenge at the best of times. So what is it that sets successful projects apart from those that struggle to get started or lose focus during their execution?
Recent ‘project fractures research’
1 into this topic reveals that the root causes of project failure (or significant variance) don’t lie in the project management methodologies or structure. The root causes actually lie in the people factors, such as how they engage in projects. What differentiates projects that successfully deliver on their expectations is a balance of project management focus across four domains. Before exploring the domains of effective project management, we should first understand the factors that lead to significant project variance or even failure to deliver.
The project fractures research received contributions from over twenty organisations ranging from suppliers to the sector, through support organisations, to ‘little’ and ‘big’ pharma. Projects examined ranged from manufacturing process improvements, through transfer of manufacturing operations, new facility builds, IT solution implementations, new product development to product registration. Three key factors emerged across ‘failing’ projects, irrespective of their technical focus:
- There is a monumental gap between what is commonly regarded as Project Management best practice and the reality of how projects are actually being managed. There is a startling difference between those projects that can be viewed as successful (in relation to achieving their expected benefits) and those that experience significant variance. The consequences of these variances are highlighted later in this article.
- A critical factor in project success or failure is the effective involvement and engagement of people. Nowhere is this more evident than in the ways that project participants and stakeholders engage and communicate.
- Risks are ignored, even when they have been identified. Many projects appear blind to risks at the planning stage, experiencing an urgency and desire to get immersed in project activities. The small proportion of projects that do consider risks at an early stage tend to focus narrowly on internal risks, rather than looking at their organisation, its strategic direction, the industry and regulatory environments.
Root causes of variance
Detailed analysis of the research data reveals four strands to the recurring causes of project variance, as described below. Correlations are clear between minimising project variance and the first of these in particular:
- People factors. This is by far the biggest cause of significant project variances, and was seen to underlie the other root causes.
- Leveraging knowledge that should have been available from previous experiences, coupled with management of assumptions.
- Definition of project processes and subsequent execution and management of changes.
- The environment within which the project operates.
Fundamental actions to minimise the occurrence of these strands are discussed later in this article.
People factors
Within the People strand, the themes include:
- Authority; expressed as an absence of empowerment or authorisation to fulfil roles. Many contributors described projects with roles not being defined, leading to a removal of drivers to act or take decisions.
- Accountability; at an organisational level, many stakeholders were found to either not have a project reflected in their goals or to have goals that directly conflicted with those of other participants (goal setting is often used by organisations as a mechanism to set priorities for a period and measure performance). Even when accountabilities were clear, participants found that people rarely suffered the consequences of failing to exercise them. An industry survey conducted by Moorhouse Consulting in May 20092 found that many people in senior project roles lacked clarity around their accountabilities.
- Engagement; typically not all key project stakeholders are involved during the scoping and initiation of projects. Consequently, their requirements and constraints are seldom fully considered in the project design. When these groups were involved at a later stage, projects experienced significant delays and revisions to reflect the true nature of requirements and constraints.
- Communication; a strong message expressed by many of the projects contributed, was that the quality and content of communication were very important to its effectiveness. People spoke of communication overload, particularly with emails, where the medium and message appeared more important than the audience needs for information. This presented real challenges in sorting out the “wheat from the chaff”. Many contributors reported a step change in effectiveness where more face-to-face communication was used. This was especially pertinent for projects that had relied heavily on remote meetings previously and for project teams that had not worked together before.
Leveraging knowledge
The Knowledge strand encompasses:
- Leveraging experience; the vast majority of projects that were discussed did not make use of existing information and knowledge from other projects that either faced similar challenges or focused on similar products/technologies. This was especially apparent during the initial scoping and planning activities. Indeed, several projects were re-planned from scratch several times during execution, each time throwing away any lessons that could have been learned. Several contributors described a reluctance from project participants to take the time to look back at past experiences, there was a strong desire to “just get on with planning and then do something, anything”.
- Making assumptions is a natural part of the planning and execution of any project. However, it was found that struggling projects could point to several assumptions that were not tested or verified and had later been found to be wrong. Even seemingly simple assumptions can come back to haunt a project in later phases; a brief phone call might have been all that was needed to verify (or deny) them. There is a strong recommendation to build a challenge to these assumptions into early project stages.
Processes
Process causes consider whether and how people define, use or monitor use of ways of working. Within highly regulated industries, these ways of working are sometimes formally documented as Standard Operating Procedures, often aligned to a project management methodology. However, this does not remove the scope for misunderstanding or variance.
- Most projects had not identified risks to completion and so did not have actions or strategies to mitigate them should they happen. Startlingly, a general reluctance to use available risk management tools was described. In several cases, this arose from negative experiences with over-engineering of risk management (often involving software that proved difficult to use in revising and managing the identified risks). Some participants admitted to having gone through the motions of a risk assessment to satisfy a “tick box” on an end of phase check-list. Many of these assessments were then filed away and not looked at again until the time came to archive the project documents.
- Impact of Changes; a high proportion of projects implemented proposed changes without first assessing their impact upon the project objectives, scope or execution strategy. Similarly to risk management, many participants expressed a reluctance to use processes and tools to assess and manage changes, usually born out of previous experience of what they described as cumbersome, slow change management systems. Without an assessment and understanding of the impacts of a change, many changes threw up issues, significant hurdles and delays to project progress.
- Using Processes; surprisingly, given the regulated nature of the industries in which projects were delivered, several projects did not define the processes that would be followed to design, execute or monitor them. Many projects were delivered within an environment with defined project management methodologies or processes. However, there were numerous examples of projects that didn’t adhere to these requirements, particularly relating to governance and the move between project phases. Often, projects adhered to all steps of a methodology regardless of their applicability to the specific project requirements, even where flexibility was built into the chosen methodology.
- Given that projects are executed within a business environment that focuses increasingly on financial performance and return on investment, very few projects examined had defined acceptance criteria for project milestones. These milestones were typically there to make go/no go decisions to proceed to the next phase of development, hence it was very difficult for project teams to be clear about the decisions needed and information to base them upon. Several participants struggled to get stakeholders to honour commitments for resources and facilities. A third of projects could show no evidence of oversight activities and addressing of issues raised.
Project environment
The project environment includes both that inside the organisation and with the relationship with a project partner or client.
- It will probably be no surprise, to those with experience of more than a few projects, that business strategy changes occur. These typically result in priority changes to the project portfolio. Typically, a project falling in priority leads to significant impacts upon the availability of planned resources and consequently to project timelines. Heightened priority often leads to more demanding timelines and a need to find additional resource from other projects.
- Scope change was experienced by the majority of project participants at some time during their involvement. Scope changes covered the spectrum from drastic reduction through to huge expansion, with many points in-between. Several projects demanded changes in scope to include new work packages as a result of unanticipated test results.
- External influences were felt by several projects, usually when partner businesses had a change in their strategy or priorities. This resulted in project scope change and even project cancellation in some cases.
The significance of project variance
How do these variances impact an organisation? What actions can we take to reduce or manage the risk of project failure?
Clearly, significant project variances have the potential for major impacts upon project delivery. These impacts are felt across the project constraints of Quality, Cost, Time, also in the extent to which the project objectives and expected benefits are eventually realised. Examples of the results of variances experienced by study participants are included in Table 1.
Result of variance
|
Impact range
|
| Incurring unforeseen and un-budgeted costs to achieve project objectives |
£00,000's - £0,000,000's |
| Delays in achieving the expected benefits |
Delays of 3 months – 2 years; Resource costs escalate |
| Failure to deliver the expected benefits |
High ratio of investment : return costs |
| Negative impact on relationships with partner organisations |
Cancellation of development agreements; Project cancellation |
| Destructive impact on the organisation and people when projects fail to meet expectations. |
Closure of departments; Reputation for failing to deliver |
Table 1 The results of significant variance
An awareness of the underlying causes for the
issues and challenges experienced by project teams, allows
identification of the characteristics that set successful projects
apart from those that suffer some degree of failure.
Controlling project variance
A balance of focus across four domains of project management; People, Process, Planning and Sponsor appears as a big differentiator for successful projects. These domains are described in Figure 1.
In each of these domains, several measures can be applied to gauge a project’s vulnerability to significant variance. Examples of such measures include:
- Ensuring that all participants share common expectations and objectives for a give project.
- Identifying key stakeholders and involving them from the start of project design.
- Applying what is already known from other projects (both successful approaches to managing risks and execution and applying relevant lessons that were identified in other similar projects).
- Having clear criteria for decision points at key stages throughout a project, to know when (or indeed whether) to move from one phase to the next.
- Participants exercising, and being held accountable for their roles, responsibilities, commitments made and actions taken.
Case study
A case study to compare
two projects, using these measures, illustrates the value of taking a
balanced approach. The assessment tool used for the case study is
available for download from
www.projectfractures.com.
The project that delivered against expectations (Figure 2) displays a largely balanced performance across the four domains.
Achieving excellence in each measure was not instrumental to a successful project outcome.
Contrasting this with a project with significant
variances (Figure 3), we observe an emphasis on the Sponsor domain,
combined with lower levels of effectiveness across the People and
Process domains in particular. This project was described as having low
levels of participant engagement and a lack of enforcement of
governance processes.
Applying the insight
Diagnostic
tools, based on the insight discussed earlier, can be used to gain an
understanding of a specific project’s vulnerabilities at either an
overview level or at an in-depth factual level. The diagnostics could
be repeated or reviewed at several points during the life cycle of the
project to build a picture of the evolving response to perceived
vulnerabilities and performance.
A first level diagnostic takes a subjective view of project vulnerabilities using the measures described earlier, considering the perceptions of participants and stakeholders of these measures. A more in-depth diagnostic could be used for a factual, objective assessment against a number of closed questions in each domain. Whilst not an absolute guarantee, any project that can answer positively to most of these questions would be robust to the effects of changes and risks.
Conclusions
Achieving a balance of focus across four domains of project management has been shown to be key to increasing the potential for project success. A set of actions emerged from the research that are fundamental to project success. The actions increase resilience to the effects of variance and enable effective management of risks.
Finding out more
You can find out more about the project fractures research and explore the use of a diagnostic, by visiting the project’s website
www.projectfractures.com. The website’s Learning Zone includes a range of downloadable resources relating to the research and its outcomes. You may wish subscribe to the e-bulletin “The Outstanding Project”, or join the LinkedIn group “Project Fractures”.
References
- Causes of project variance in the biomedical sector and how to address them, Three Circles Consulting Ltd, 2009
- A survey of senior responsible project owners commissioned by Moorhouse Consulting, along with sponsors BT, the Home Office, Association of Project Management (APM) and The APM Group, 2009
Matthew Theobald is Principal of Three Circles Consulting Ltd. For over eight years, he has collaborated with biomedical organisations to improve the effectiveness of their project delivery, enabling them to achieve the anticipated project benefits and a return on investment. He draws upon a pedigree of more than seventeen years experience within the biomedical sector, including projects spanning multiple disciplines of the product life cycle, quality management, regulatory and standards compliance, coupled with effective delivery of education programmes to support change activities.
