Category: Senior Executive

What Is a Project Anyway?

You may be familiar with common, everyday projects like road construction, a new building, or an addition to your house. These kinds of projects seem to have no end sometimes. Other projects do have a deadline, like the local 10k race on Labor Day, the grand opening of a new grocery store, or the first day of school.

Definitions

All of these projects meet the standard dictionary definitions:

    • an individual or collaborative enterprise that is planned to achieve a particular aim
    • a temporary, rather than permanent, social system, constituted by teams, within or across organizations, to do particular tasks under time constraints
    • a set of interrelated tasks to be executed over a fixed period and within certain cost and other limitations

Projects Examples

Using these definitions, we can include other more mundane activities as a project:

    • Brewing a cup of coffee with an Aeropress
    • Going on an over night camping trip
    • Organizing a school play
    • Making a pizza at home
    • Launching a new, digital marketing campaign
OK, the last one isn’t mundane, but expand your project definition a little bit for a minute. There is almost always some planning involved, some set of activities you do by yourself or with others, and some sense of time to complete the activity.
 
Projects are not sacred events, reserved for engineers or general contractors.  We all co-ordinate tasks and sometimes “manage” many simultaneous projects.  To be successful in our lives, we need to bring together the right people for the right reason, with the right resources, at the right place, at the right time.
To improve the likely-hood of success, there has been a long history of developing tools and techniques applied to the management of projects.

Measuring Success

Notice how many parts of the project’s definition are needed, e.g., people, the reasons, resources, place and time. And, don’t forget there is a conscious or sometimes unconscious way of measuring success such as:

    • How does your Aeropress coffee taste?
    • Did we forget anything on our camping trip?
    • Did all the actors remember their lines?
    • How crispy is the crust on our pizza?

These definitions of success are in stark contrast to larger corporate-type projects, for instance. 

Large project success criteria include things like:

    • Meeting or finishing under the original budget
    • Delivering all the features and benefits described in the multi-page contract
    • Organizing all the 10k race participants at the starting line at the start of the race

But, don’t be mislead, even our small, personal coffee, camping, school play or pizza projects can be measured by three important elements:

    1. How much did the project cost?
    2. Was everything delivered as planned?
    3. Did the project take a reasonable amount of time or was it completed on time?
Usually, in a wide variety of projects, the objectives for three elements must be achieved in order for the project to be successful.
 
If you take a few minutes today and look for these elements in the things you do, you’ll see almost everything is a project; make it count!

Glimpse Into the History of Project Management Performance

While there are many studies which reveal the success and failure rate of many project like the one’s listed below:

In a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers, they review 10,640 projects from 200 companies in 30 countries and across various industries, and found that only 2.5% of the companies successfully completed 100% of their projects.

A study published in the Harvard Business Review, analyzed 1,471 IT projects, found that the average overrun was 27%, but one in six projects had an average cost overrun of 200% and a schedule overrun of almost 70%.

It also doesn’t take long to see that there hasn’t been much change in the results over the years despite the efforts attempted to improve the results.  Maybe you have experienced similar, persistent project problems.

From the infamous Standish Report of 1994:

The Standish Group research shows a staggering 31.1% of projects will be canceled before the ever get completed. Further results indicate 52.7% of projects will cost 189% of their original estimates. The lost opportunity costs are not measurable, but could easily be in the trillions of dollars.

In June of 2012, a Gartner survey revealed:

In analyzing the collective responses of some 150 participants in the 2011 Gartner five-country survey, the failure rate of IT projects with budgets exceeding $1 million was found to be almost 50% higher than for projects with budgets below $350,000.

From the Project Management Institute Pulse Report:

In 2012, the Pulse research reported dollars lost for that year as US$120M for every US$1B spent on projects. In 2013, that amount was US$135M for every US$1B. Dollars lost is the product of the average percentage of projects not meeting goals multiplied by the average percentage of a project’s budget that is lost if the project fails. Year-to-year variance is caused by changes seen in either, or both, of these two metrics.

From the International Journal of Innovation, Management and Technology, Vol. 8, No. 2, April 2017 shows it’s not an isolated case:

Construction projects around the world have a very poor performance record with respect to being completed within cost, time and quality objectives. Morris considers cost overrun as a “regular feature” for public projects. Causes and factors related to cost overrun in construction projects have been traced worldwide and in specific contexts, e.g., the USA, Nigeria, Indonesia, the UK, Ghana, Kuwait, Philippines and Thailand, Pakistan, Gaza Strip, South Korea, Australia, South Africa, Malaysia, Netherlands, Turkey, Israel, Uganda, and Saudi Arabia.

I’m going to assume many of these projects were lead by professionals or folks who have a lot of experience; at least, enough experience to be assigned to these projects my their manager.

If these folks can produce these kind of results, what chance does everyone else who manages a project have?