Back from the brink

FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION.

It certainly sounds like a plan, but getting a project back on track takes more than majestic proclamations.

And the odds aren't exactly on your side. According to The Standish Group, 24 percent of IT projects worldwide in 2008 were either canceled before completion or delivered but never used.

There's no end to the reasons a project can go woefully off track: market shifts, poor planning, budget cuts, personal conflicts, changing corporate priorities.

If a project manager is paying attention, though, the signs are all there—especially those from on high.

“A rapid decline in executive commitment, redirection of funds away from a project or increasing vocal dissatisfaction among the main customers and stakeholders are all ominous signs that a project is failing,” says Alex Julian, PMP, program manager at Resource IT Solutions, São Paulo, Brazil.

Some projects get the ax, while others are marked for rescue. And often, the call on whether the projects should be salvaged has little to do with how well they're progressing.

“A lot of these decisions are tied to business reasons,” says Brian H. Munroe, PMP, CEO of MTI Learning Inc., a training company in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

Projects linked to client requirements or key business or governmental strategies, for example, will carry on— no matter what. “Some projects just have to happen,” he says.

If a project is deemed worth saving, it's up to the project manager to identify what's pushing it off the rails and how to get it back on track—quickly.

“There is a limited window of opportunity for a troubled project to be easily recovered,” says Mr. Munroe. “And the longer you wait, the more time-consuming and expensive it can be—if a recovery is still possible.”

Mr. Monroe points to a project he recently helped salvage. Two buildings on a remote office campus were going through an IT equipment retrofit. The project was in the final phase, which involved connecting the buildings to the main IT network via fiber optic cable. However, no one noticed that the cable would have to cross a railroad track—which required an easement permit that would take 12 to 18 months to secure.

Just two weeks before the project's scheduled end date, Mr. Munroe received an emergency call and drove 14 hours to the site to deal with the situation. After numerous meetings with the stakeholders, he was in the parking lot when he noticed a series of towers that fed wires high over the terrain. Mr. Munroe reached out to the tower owners, who agreed to use those static lines to run the fiber optic cable to connect the buildings.

“A rapid decline in executive commitment, redirection of funds away from a project or increasing vocal dissatisfaction among the main customers and stakeholders are all ominous signs that a project is failing.”

—Alex Julian, PMP, Resource IT Solutions, São Paulo, Brazil

“It was four times the cost and added four months to the project—but the project didn't fail,” he says.

It did provide a painful lesson in doing your homework.

“If the team had done proper stakeholder planning and risk assessment,” Mr. Munroe says, “we could have applied for the railroad permit early on and gotten the project done on time and within the original budget.”

PICKING UP THE PIECES

Troubled projects can frequently be traced back to a lack of comprehensive upfront planning and a solid objective, says Geoff Vincent, principal consultant at CITI, a change management consultancy in Newport Pagnell, England.

“One of the key tests to determine whether a project is capable of succeeding is whether the mission of the project is well-defined,” he says.

Too often the answer is no—and that's a huge problem.

“Without a mission, there is no alignment, no definition of what ‘good’ looks like, and everyone has different goals,” he says.

In those situations, scope creep is inevitable and costs can balloon.

When Mr. Vincent is brought in to rescue projects, he begins by helping the team define the objective, even if the project is already in the works. He also talks to key people on the team, identifies stakeholders and reviews project documents before making any assumptions about what—or who—caused the problems in the first place.

“The easy thing is to blame the project manager, but there are a whole lot of other issues that could be to blame,” he says. “It may be a lack of governance or process, too few resources or poor sponsorship. You have to look at the problems in a systematic way.”

The process of untangling a project's knots must be handled carefully and thoughtfully, especially if you're brought in to get the project back on track, warns Teresa Shull, PMP, IT project manager at National Government Services Inc., a federal health insurance contractor in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA.

“When you take over a project in the middle, you need to begin by earning the team's respect,” she says.

Ms. Shull recalls being brought in to support a struggling interactive voice response implementation. After the project manager who'd been leading the project left the company, it fell to a technical lead with little project management experience. There were no project management processes in place, and the team was rife with infighting. Ms. Shull identified the problems right away but also recognized that the technical lead was a valuable resource who had key relationships with all the vendors.

“I took over management of the project slowly, while implementing more in-depth project management processes,” she says.

After securing the technical lead's permission, she began running portions of project meetings, focusing on task items and creating accountability. Little by little, she took over all the meetings, freeing the technical lead to focus on other responsibilities. Ms. Shull was eventually able to implement a project management infrastructure while leaving the technical lead as the official head of the project.

“By adding processes and holding people accountable, we got things done, the project was saved, and the technical lead was able to focus on getting the job done,” she says.

Taking a quiet, careful approach is the best way to ease into a struggling project, agrees Frank Cox, PMP, project management officer at the Department of Corrections in the Missouri Office of Administration, Jefferson City, Missouri, USA.

HERE COMES TROUBLE

“As a new project manager on a failing project, you need to shut up and listen for a while so you can gain an understanding of the nature of the problems,” he says. “The object is to get the team back on track and eliminate what's distracting them. You need their trust to do that.”

NOW WHAT?

Once the problems have been identified, it's the project manager's job to figure out how to solve them, says Rashid Sial, project manager at Wireless Generation, an educational software services company in New York, New York, USA. He suggests developing several potential solutions and then showing stakeholders:

• What can be accomplished in the time remaining with minimal risk
• What can be done with a higher-risk, more intensive plan
• What should be cut or moved to another project

“As a new project manager on a failing project, you need to shut up and listen for a while so you can gain an understanding of the nature of the problems.”

—Frank Cox, PMP, Missouri Office of Administration, Jefferson City, Missouri, USA

“Stakeholders respond well to having options, and you should never raise problems without offering solutions,” he says. “You don't want to be perceived as a project manager who is not in control of the project.”

By offering options, you also make stakeholders part of the solution decision-making process, which creates buy-in and support.

“A project manager alone rarely has the authority to solve problems,” he says. “You need the support of someone at the sponsorship level to make it happen.”

The rescue plan might involve scaling the project back to more reasonable goals, increasing the time or number of resources, or filling a knowledge or skill gap on the team. Sometimes, certain resources may have to be removed from the project if there are warring factions or struggles with burnout.

“At the team level, if you have a person who is creating conflicts, you may have no recourse but to remove her or him,” says Mr. Cox.

In cases where that's not an option, Ms. Shull suggests hosting team meetings to clear the air, and to create accountability and team cohesion.

“If team members won't work together on their own, I run working meetings to get everyone back on the same page and to give them a chance to tell me what they need,” she says.

IN THE LOOP

There's no way to save a failing project without an open dialogue, says Mr. Julian.

“Ninety percent of what the project manager does is communicate,” he says. “And a project team without a good communication process is damned to fail.”

It doesn't just begin and end with the team, either. Stakeholders must also be kept in the loop, says Mr. Cox.

For some projects, the very perception of a problem project is the direct result of poor communication.

“Sometimes executives misconstrue project variance for project failure,” he says. “Project time or cost variance from the performance management baseline indicates a need for attention to a delay or the reason for an overrun, but may not raise a failure flag. Variance does not automatically lead to failure, but can if left unchecked. Effective project control may decrease variance, and reduce or eliminate a perception that a project is failing.”

For example, a 10-month project with a US$1 million budget may have a US$100,000 scheduled spend for each month. But the project leader could choose to buy a large amount of equipment earlier in the project cycle to take advantage of a tax incentive or purchase deal.

“Suddenly the amount of money spent in February is twice what's budgeted. If you don't communicate a reason for that overrun, the stakeholders may panic and think the project is failing,” Mr. Cox explains. “When project managers don't report on project progress, they can unnecessarily lose control of their project and jeopardize its status.”

But all hope is not necessarily lost.

“Almost any project can be saved through project planning,” he says. “If you take the time to determine what project processes need to be completed, you dramatically increase the probability that the project will not fail.” PM