Editor’s Choice Award 2020

I am delighted to have received the Editor’s Choice Award for my article, published in PM World Journal, on governance. The word ‘governance’ is one that can really get the ‘C’ level animated but few people really seem to understand what it means. They talk about ‘governance structure’ and ‘governance process’ as if the board structure and a decision making process is all that matters. Nothing could be further from the truth.

For the full article see: https://docs.projectworkout.com/pmwj99-Nov2020-Buttrick.pdf

The Programme and Portfolio Workout is launched

The Programme and Portfolio Workout has been launched. Together with its companion, The Project Workout, this book aims to help you run your organization in a structured, yet agile way so you can meet your strategic goals and make sure all parts of your organization are aligned.

I have made three short videos introducing the books:

1. The first video shows how these books have grown out of the original ‘Project Workout’, first published in 1997 and how they now give you the knowledge and thinking to make your organization succeed.
2. The second video describes The Project Workout and how you can direct and manage one project at a time.
3. The third video describes The Programme and Portfolio Workout, and how you can direct the tens, hundreds or even thousands of piece of work in your organization.

You can see these videos on Robert’s web site

Top down failure and other things . . .

I was recently interviewed by journalist, Yu Yanjuan, Project Management Review: PMR (China) and International Correspondent, PM World Journal.

In this interview, titled “Project failure is top down”, Robert describes how he started working in project management,  where his books originated from and what influenced them. He then goes on to discuss failure (and success!), the importance of excellent sponsorship, the balance between people and process and about his work with the UK government on their project delivery functional standard.  It also includes a few new cartoons!

 

Read the full interview 

Project management excellence is not enough

Beware of doing too many projects, even if they do fit your strategy and have a good business case.

The opening plenary sessions of the 2013 Gartner PPM and IT Summit in London, set the tone for a mind-set shift in how Gartner looks at “IT management”.  To date they have focussed in on “IT” and the “CIO”, and, in my view, perpetuating the gap between what they term “IT” and the “Business” . This year, to my delight, they were starting to talk about “the business” and IT’s part in it. It’s a brave thing to do, but the right thing to do. Most organisations still have their IT split off as separate organisational units ,with a separate strategy and loads of money, which tries to work out what “the business” wants and then all too often fails to meet those expectations. What is guaranteed though, is if you give an IT department money, they will spend it all, even if the business need is unclear. . . . that’s the “business’” fault!

Mike Langley from PMI was a key note speaker and gave his view on the all important question of “how do we ensure our (IT) projects fit our strategy?”  Notice I put “IT” in brackets – the department is irrelevant as we want all our projects to align with strategy . . . don’t we?

Mike based his talk on PMI’s recent “Pulse of the profession” survey.

We are all familiar with “strategy” and “execution” (sorry for using the “e” word, but when at an American conference, you can’t get away from it!).  The story is that the business leaders set the strategy and then the “business” implements it. If it goes wrong, it’s usually the fault of the business and their dreadful requirements and poor implementation!  What new research for Harvard Business Review is now talking about is that implementation is part of strategy and we should not separate them. (Look out McKinsey and Bain!) After all, if your strategy doesn’t include how to implement itself, then it’s a poor strategy.  The new buzz words for making this happen is “portfolio management”. This is a discipline of making sure that the programmes, projects and other activities that a business decides to do are the rights ones in terms of strategic direction, fit and balance in terms of risk and skills use. It’s all about selecting the right projects.

Mike says his research shows that organisations which are good at portfolio management are more agile, and have better project outcomes. Portfolio management is integral to how the top level leaders want to manage their business; it’s an integral part of business planning. Traditional business planning adds up costs of departmental budgets, checks against revenue and makes sure there is “interlock” if different departments need to work together.  Usually this is done a year or so in advance and is therefore totally pointless for organisations in fast moving environments. It is however a neat and simplistic way to blame people when things go wrong or costs to much. Hence, getting portfolio management working right is as much to do with mind-set as having the processes, systems and operating model.

Getting this right, means organisations can continuously tune their plans, not be tied to outdated annual budgets and use their people and money where the benefit is most attractive.  The money will follow the business need, not the department doing the work. Now that is what I call true organisational agility and if you have read the Project Workout, it will be very familiar to you.

This isn’t new as a concept, but it is something many organisations struggle with.  Have a look at this article: Excellence is not enough from the Project Workout “articles” web page.

What to do about ineffective sponsors

The sponsor’s behaviours set the tone for everyone but are they always beneficial?

Research from Scott Keller and Colin Price (McKinsey’s) in their book,”Beyond Performance: HowGreat Organizations Build Ultimate Competitive Advantage,” points to programme or project sponsorship as being the most critical factor in achieving project success. I agree with them. Unfortunately in organisations with low maturity in programme and project management, this role is often  totally missing, misunderstood or the behaviours promote the wrong outcomes. This doesn’t seem to be an uncommon problem. But what can you do about it? One writer, Peter Taylor, proposes that a PMO could act as a surrogate “sponsor” and be used to help senior executives understand and perform that role better.

Have a look at his full article here, and see what you think.

Now imagine, if sponsorship was done well, what a difference that would make: programmes and projects would link to strategy, be prioritised on the basis of business benefit and only done if the need or opportunity is compelling . . . even if money is left over in the annual budget!!! Perhaps we could even go as far as the funds being assigned to the projects themselves, rather than to departments (cost centres) doing the work; now there’s a thought. CFOs, pay attention! Also consider, how can “portfolio management” work, if the role of the sponsor is not understood?

Let me know your thoughts on this. Are the programme and project sponsors in your organisation effective? If so, how did you achieve that? If not, how are you tackling the problem? I think that this is one of the great challenges to improving programme and project performance; there is only so much the “middle” can do, the “top” needs to play their part too.

See also my blog, “Enemies within” in which I argue senior management get the peformance they deserve. Controversial, eh?

PowerPoint kills businesses – discuss.

If Romans had PowerPoint, would they have used it?

This is a story about the evils of PowerPoint. It was first told by Edward Tufte, who some people consider as the most brilliant mind alive on information design. Tufte wrote the book on graphics theory, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information — and in one of his most intriguing  diversions has lambasted PowerPoint for being “a boil on human communication”.

Tufte explained how one horrible PowerPoint slide led to the 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia explosion — or more accurately, the horrible bullet structure PowerPoint gives us (and too many people use) caused the disaster. The problem is PowerPoint encourages writers to use clipped jargon that is hard to understand — and if the point fails, bad decisions get made. This is compounded by the fact that people often write grammatically incomplete sentences so that the meaning is actually impossible to determine . . . . all because someone wants it to fit on a bullet point line in a really big font.

As you likely recall, Columbia blew up on re-entry, after a large piece of foam broke off during launch and damaged the edge of a wing. Before the Columbia accident, foam had become detached during many other shuttle launches, so an internal report was crucial in determining how much risk the foam presented. Would a lot of foam detach? And could it hit the shuttle elsewhere with a lot of force?

In our businesses, this is what seems to happen:
1) People do a thorough analysis and write good reports.
2) The good report is then summarised into PowerPoint slides as that is “what senior management demand”
3) People find out that no-one actually reads their thorough reports and so stop doing them . . . perhaps also, even weakening their analyses.
4) Instead, they jump straight to creating a PowerPoint deck “summarising” something that doesn’t exist. (No one will find out anyway!)

Did you know that you can put far more good quality detail in a traditional two page “MS Word” report than on a 10 page set of PowerPoint slides? So why do we insist on using these as the primary way of communicating and as a foundation for decisions? Why don’t we simply use PowerPoint where it actually adds some value, rather than detract from it?

What’s your view?

1. Do you LOVE PowerPoint and insist it is used?
2. Is your organisation fixated on PowerPoint?
3. Do you hate it but comply with our organisation’s flow?
4. Do you have other ideas?

One theory I have is that strategy consultants traditionally use landscape style, slide decks for their “reports” and their clients follow suit, after all people like Bain  and McKinsey can’t be wrong, can they?

References:
You can look at a whole range of articles on the shuttle disaster here.

Or if you just have time to look at one, then read this one.

Enemies within – why this ‘project stuff’ doesn’t work

Far too many projects fail.

Project management, in the modern sense, has been with us a long time now. Some people have spent most, if not all their careers engaged in it in one form or another. Research and anecdotal evidence, however, seems to indicate that we still don’t “get it”. Reports continue to be written on “causes of project failure”. Eminent committees are set up to “get to the root of the problem”, international and national standards are created and yet:

• we still see failure.
• we still see organisations which ignore the benefits.

Why is this? If I could answer that, then I would be able to charge massive consulting fees! The question is rather like that posed in “Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy” asking, “What is the meaning of life?”  As we all know, the answer is “42” – which doesn’t help us one jot. If I ever came across anyone who knew the solution to stopping “project failure”, I would be very skeptical.

So why can’t people grasp the significance and advantages of business-led project management? We have:

• lots of good books – like the Project Workout!
• National and international standards such as BS6079 and ISO21500
• Leaned societies, like the APM and PMI
• Conferences galore

Actually, when the Project Workout came out in 1997 it was probably the first to put project management in a business context; earlier books were focused on project management techniques.

Back to the topic! Having good methods and process supported by good tools and systems with clear accountabilities is necessary but not enough. The critical difference comes from an organisation’s culture; how they behave and their values. Give me the right culture and mediocre process over poor culture and brilliant process, any day. Organisations where project management “doesn’t work”, are likely to have a culture which actively prevents it from working. For example, for project management to be effective, we need more than just good project managers; for example:

• project sponsorship is vital if the projects are to be linked to strategy
• portfolio management (called business programme management in the Project Workout) is necessary to balance risk and choose those projects which will get you towards your strategic intent faster
• finance systems, which enable project sponsors, managers and teams to see, their operational figures “live”
• resource management so you can take account of constraints in choosing and implementing your projects.

Hunter Thompson, in 1970, said “In a democracy, people usually get the kind of government they deserve and they deserve what they get.” In this he blames the people in a democracy. Organisations, however are not democracies and so I would turn that quotation on its head:

“Senior teams get the project management performance they deserve“.

The CEO sets the culture and “the way they want to run their business” and the following list indicates where the culture and values promote failure, rather than success. Running a project is difficult enough, but we often make it more arduous than it need be by creating problems for ourselves. Here are a few examples:

1. Reorganising – either the company or a part of it. Tinkering with your structure is usually NOT the solution to your problems, it just confuses people. If you are a senior executive, however, reorganising is a great way to hide non-delivery!
2. Functional thinking – not taking the helicopter, the organisation-wide view. This often happens when executives’ or individuals’ bonuses are based on targets which are at odds with the organisation’s needs, e.g. sales bonus rewarded on revenue, regardless of profit or contribution.
3. Having too many rules – the more rules you have, the more sinners you create and the less happy your people become. Have you ever met a happy bureaucrat?
4. Disappearing and changing sponsors – without a sponsor there should be no project. Continual changing of the ‘driver’ will cause you to lose focus and forget WHY you are undertaking the project. Consider terminating such a project to see who really wants it!
5. Ignoring the risks – risks don’t go away, so acknowledge them and manage them. If I said that a certain aeroplane is likely to crash, would you fly on it? And yet, every day executives approve projects when a simple risk analysis shows they are highly likely to fail.
6. Dash in and get on with it! – if a project is that important, you haven’t the time NOT to plan your way ahead. High activity levels do not necessarily mean action or progress.
7. Analysis paralysis – you need to investigate, but only enough to gain the confidence to move on. This is the opposite to dash in and ignore the risks. It is also a ploy used to delay projects: ‘. . . I haven’t quite enough information to make a decision, just do some more study work.’
8. Untested assumptions – all assumptions are risks; treat them as such.
9. Forgetting what the project is for – if this happens, terminate the project. If it is that useful, someone will scream and remember why it is being done.
10. Executive’s ‘pet projects’ – have no exceptions. If an executive’s idea is really so good, it should stand up to the scrutiny that all the others go through. He or she may have a helicopter view, but might also have their head in the clouds.

I’m sure you can add to that list, so please do, by adding a comment. Over the next few months, I’ll investigate a number of the above symptoms.

In the meantime, you can find out more about these topics from The Project Workout (5th edition):

• lessons on what works: Chapter 2
• sponsorship: Chapter 5
• portfolio management: Chapter 3
• resource management: Chapter 21
• finances: Chapter 22

More on meetings

Are your meetings a bit like this?

I did a blog on meetings last year, called I hate (some) meetings and one of the comments asked for some advice on conducting meetings. I suppose meetings are so common place that few people give any thought to making them run effectively. As a consequence, we find far too many meetings are an inedible waste of time. So, here we is some advice to take us back to the basics.

Firstly, do not hold a meeting at all if there is a better way of achieving the objective. The time taken during the meeting should typically represent only 10% to 20% of the total time needed to prepare for and follow up the meeting; use your time appropriately.

Before the meeting, the person calling the meeting should:

• fix the objective, venue, date, time and attendance well in advance; keep numbers to a minimum

• ensure all required parties are invited and have authority/knowledge to take decisions and/or make a valid contribution
• set accountability and time limits for each agenda item, taking into account the participants’ different interest levels for each item
• send out agenda and written submissions in time to allow participants to prepare.
  Those invited should accept the invitation, decline or provide a substitute attendee, as appropriate.

At the meeting:
The Chair should:

• confirm who the note taker is
• confirm the objective of the meeting
• start and finish the meeting on time: censure late arrivals.
• stick to the agenda and timetable.
• ensure there is an agreed approach for undertaking each agenda item.
• keep the meeting focused.
• ensure full, participative discussion takes place.
• guillotine “knotty” issues for resolution outside the meeting.
• summarise each agenda item at the end and ensure agreements and actions are recorded .
• agree and fix date for next meeting, if needed.
• seek meeting participants’ feedback on the effectiveness of the meeting.

The Note taker should:

•   act as the Chair’s right hand person.
•   ensure all decisions and agreements are noted.
•   take brief, relevant, action oriented notes.

Meeting participants should:

• keep to the point and be brief.
• listen to others and should not hold private meetings.
• be constructive, adopting a “can do” approach
• agree realistic plans/actions.
• make a note of their own actions (including recipient and date).

After the meeting:
The Chair should:

• review the effectiveness of the meeting and note improvement points for the next meeting.

The Note taker should:

• publish the notes or minutes to the participants and those who need them within 1 day. What is the point of “old minutes”, they are no good to anyone. It takes the same time to do them straight away as to do them a month later – it’s just a matter of you organizing yourself.

Participants should:

• assess their own effectiveness at the meeting and note areas for improvement; make suggestions to the Chair if appropriate.
• read the minutes and address all actions and note those actions where they are the “recipient”.

HINTS
If you use a collaboration tool such as SharePoint or Livelink, use a task list to record the meeting’s actions. In this way, no actions are lost and those accountable for each action can readily find them.

Place “Review of Previous Minutes” towards the end of the meeting agenda, rather than at the beginning. This will encourage the meeting to go forward rather than starting by dwelling on what happened last time. If important, many of these items will be dealt with in the main agenda items.

If the notes are not for a formal meeting then consider the use of hand-written notes or as a photocopied page in your work book:

•  record actions, in hand-writing at the meeting,
• photocopy the sheet(s) just before the end of the meeting,
• distribute to participants before they leave.
• scan and file the handwritten note if you need a record.

. . . and make sure you all behave well at the meeting:

• Start on time
• Switch off or silence mobile devices
• Keep to the agenda – Stick to the point
• No private meetings
• No interruptions or walk-outs
• Be constructive
• Speak out during the meeting – not afterwards
• Be polite
• LISTEN!
• Agree conclusions and actions
• FINISH ON TIME

Be a nut, be a leader!

A leaders on his or her own is useless. There must be followers and the “first follower” is the most important, if change is to happen.

Do you think leadership is glorious? Is change totally dependent on the
leader? Do you think if a person looks ridiculous, they aren’t a leader?
Have a look at this video from Derek Sivers, I think you’ll enjoy it . . . and you might change your views on leadership:

See the Dancing Guy video.

So what’s the bottom line?

1. If you are a version of the shirtless dancing guy, all alone, remember the importance of nurturing your first few followers as equals, making everything clearly about the movement, not you.
2. Be public. Be easy to follow!
3. But the biggest lesson here – did you catch it? – Leadership is over-glorified
4. It started with the shirtless nut, and he’ll get all the credit, but it was the first follower who transformed a lone nut into a leader.
5. There is no movement without the first follower.

We’re told we all need to be leaders, but that would be really ineffective. The best way to make a movement, if you really care, is to courageously follow and show others how to follow. So, when you find a lone nut doing something great . . . .

Have the guts to be the first person to stand up and join in.

Source: Derek Sivers; www.sivers.org

PPM but not as we know it – learn from the Romans

I am sure you’ll want to go home, put your feet up and forget about your programmes and projects for a while . . . but what if withdrawal symptoms set in and you have that urge to peek at your Blackberry or just take a look at that last report . . . help is at hand with a book extolling the virtues of programme and project management on the scale of the Roman Empire. Follow Emperor Sponsus on his path to glory and the trials and tribulations of general Marcus Projex Magna as he struggles to turn Sponsus’ vision into a reality.

This is programme management that you won’t learn about at Saeed Business School’s BT Centre for Major Programme Management in Oxford, nor from PMI or APM or MSP, nor anywhere else, for that matter.

Click here to download your cartoon book: How Rome was lost