On projects, the common success criteria are “on-time”, “on-budget” and “to-specification” – what is often referred to as the Iron Triangle.
Time, cost and scope are religiously planned, tracked and evaluated, with time and cost continuously being the key subject for status reporting and discussions on steering committee and management meetings.
For larger projects and programmes, entire controlling functions are established to provide, process and present data on time and cost.
If a project is completed on time and budget, it’s regarded as a success.
And if the project also completes the defined scope it’s an even greater success…
This is still by far the predominant view on project success, and regardless that the last 20 years have been spent on introducing new project management approaches and methodologies, in essence, the general perception of project success hasn’t changed.
Most projects (still) fail
Studies have repeatedly shown that projects more often fail than succeed.
The Standish Chaos Report is probably the best-known source for this information, but also studies from McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, Deloitte and others show the same.
For the past 20 years enormous investments have been made in training and implementing methodologies, frameworks, and practices to make projects become more predictable and improve their ability to deliver what the business needs. Agile, Scrum, Kanban, Lean, SAFe, Prince2, MSP, etc. just to mention some, and the expectation could be that these huge investments would make the project success rate improve dramatically.
But, according to Standish, the project success rate in year 2000 was 28% and in 2018 it reached 42% with Agile, while Waterfall remained at the 2000 level.
We believe that we could have expected more, and we are a bit pessimistic about how much more success rates will continue to improve with the current focus on project management, change management, portfolio management, etc. as long as we continue to ignore what it really is we are trying to achieve:
We execute projects to make changes that create business value
The keyword in that sentence is “value”, not “projects” nor “change”.
“Projects” and “change” are simply means of reaching the goal in the same way as time and cost are merely inputs to the project process.
So, project success is measured by the inputs and not by the outcomes, and organisations make their project people strive hard to become excellent drivers of projects without knowing exactly where they are going, as the destination – the business outcomes, the benefits and the business value – remain unclear.
Therefore, the approach and the focus are wrong.
If we are to really improve on project success rates, we must focus more on what it is we want to achieve – the desired business outcomes – instead of focusing solely on the inputs and outputs.
Therefore, business value delivery – including benefits management, which is a core element in business value delivery – is the key catalyst to achieve better results and improved project reliability.
Value delivery and Agile
Modern agile methodologies all have one thing in common (and in common with Waterfall), and that is the lack of focus on the business value that the project is commissioned to deliver. That is clearly a shortcoming.
Sometimes, when talking to Release Train Engineers, Project Managers, Scrum Masters and Product Owners about this, they claim that the agile methods actually do handle business value.
But, from a business value delivery perspective, we disagree as the methods don’t make the value, the benefits and the desired business outcomes the key focal point for projects. They all continue to address the “how we produce” and not the “what we produce”. We need to more often ask ourselves why we are doing a project. Why is it important?
Addressing how we run projects responsibly in a good, structured, transparent and involving way is of course very important.
It is as important a prerequisite for running successful projects as is the management of benefits and value. But neither of these can stand alone. To be truly successful we need both, and by running projects with sole focus on the “how we produce”, we may end up executing projects perfectly – on time, on budget, to specification – but producing something there is no need for and thus isn’t worth the money and effort.
The business value, the benefits and the desired business outcomes are the reason why we run projects. They are the real measures for project success, and thus they should be handled as thoroughly as we handle time and cost.
Value Delivery can be simple
Value Delivery and Benefits Management isn’t hard or complicated at all. There are methods, tools and processes available to be taken into use, but basically for a start it’s just a matter of changing the traditional approach to project execution from being focused on the inputs to defining, tracking and managing the outputs.
If this matter is of interest to you or you’d like to have a talk about how to improve project success and value delivery in your organisation, simply reach out to us using the form below.
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