May 2007

Managing Successful Projects: Where Disciplines Meet

Introduction

Why do some projects fail, while others succeed? What does your experience tell you?

If you have lived through a few major projects, chances are you have seen at least one of the following cause difficulties, damage, or even death to a project:

Conflicts of all shapes and sizes, including “turf wars”
Inadequate preparation
Misunderstandings about expectations
Analysis paralysis
Solutions to problems that address symptoms, not root causes
Inadequate attention to, and communication about, project impacts

These kinds of problems are all too common. At the same time, the skills to deal with them are readily at hand, and are often referred to as people skills. While in the past these skills suffered from neglect by technology-focused project and program managers, recently, they have been recognized as contributing significant value to project success.

Project managers possessing these skills often learn them the hard way- by making mistakes and hopefully living through them. An alternative approach is to gather people with backgrounds in both Organizational Change Management and related disciplines¹ with experienced practitioners of Project Management².

Combining Organizational Change Management with Strategic Project Management

In this paper we will describe a specific set of skills that we have found especially useful when combined with Strategic Project Management, the management of large-scale, complex projects that are critical to achieving strategic goals. The combination of these disciplines greatly increases the likelihood of project success.

To make these skills most useful, we link them to the project life cycle phases where they have the greatest relevance. Practicing the skills in the phases where they are especially relevant increases the likelihood of project success.

Project management professionals may choose to master the skills on their own or engage Organizational Change Management specialists. These specialists may provide direct client service and/or coach and educate Strategic Project Managers in the relevant skills. At the end of this paper, we have included a self-assessment for you to determine how well you currently can put the skills we describe into practice, and what skill areas you may want to develop. Regardless of your role on projects – as sponsor, project manager, or hands-on specialist – you will be able to increase your effectiveness by learning these skills.

Examples of Project Problems Caused by “People Issues”
Project Problem	People-related Cause
Inadequate system performance or complete failure Implementation drags or stalls Low motivation to use system Expected cost and time-saving system benefits not achieved People not getting information they need from the system System benefits not achieved Implementation problems interact in unexpected ways producing cost overruns	System expectations not clearly set with vendor or developer Buy-in from key managers not achieved Lack of visible management support Workflows and jobs not redesigned prior to implementation Unresolved disagreements about data definitions Inadequate training to use system Implementation plan is too aggressive

Skills and Project Phases

There are many different project management methods in use today. For simplicity in this article, we will use a fairly common, high-level structure that can be applied to many types of projects, including Information Systems, as well as other types of projects³:

1. Initiate Project

2. Analyze Problem/Opportunity

3. Design/Develop Solution

4. Deploy Solution

While the change leadership skills are useful throughout all the phases, each skill has particular relevance to a specific phase.

Phase 1: Initiate Project

This phase typically includes the following:

Making the business case for the project
Staffing the project
Clarifying scope, objectives, and roles
Starting up the project team

Following are some of the skills and related actions that fit these activities:

Skill #1: Facilitate robust dialogue to achieve alignment on priorities. Getting alignment on priorities is one of the most difficult challenges facing any project. In many organizations, disagreements about priorities are dealt with by smoothing them over or by avoiding them. This creates long lists of things that need to be prioritized—too many customer or client needs, objectives, action items, metrics, etc. Yet, lack of priorities will increase project cost and duration. To lower these costs, managers can use robust dialogue, which requires:

Stating assumptions clearly
Using objective data to support reasons
Asking direct questions about the assumptions, data, and reasons others are using and inviting others to do the same regarding your own assumptions

Using robust dialogue gets managers beyond the face-saving, lobbying, or debating that bogs down many meetings. In short, robust dialogue helps people prioritize effectively and efficiently, and this alignment is absolutely critical to a successful project launch.

Key Action Steps: Identify and resolve disagreements about customer needs, project scope and objectives, business case, and initial plans. You can do this by clarifying assumptions, facts, and reasons. Set up ground rules for meetings to help people avoid the need for face-saving, lobbying, and debating. These steps will help reduce project costs and duration.

Skill #2: Involve people in planning to increase commitment.
The importance of involvement has been well-known for decades, although, as any managers know, it is not easy to actually do. Who do you involve? How much? For how long? These are often tough questions and the answers will differ depending on the type of project and its scope. Our experience is that involving the people who have the biggest stake in the project, in ways that are feasible in the organizational culture, is a good way to start. There are many ways to get input – workout sessions, town meetings, surveys, etc. The key point is to act with integrity and clear intentions. If employees know you are doing your best to get input and are really listening to it, your efforts will be rewarded.

Key Action Steps: Create a shared definition of the problem as well as the solution. Make sure that a critical mass of people who have a stake in the project have input into planning, and that you draw from different perspectives. Depending on the size and scope of the project, this could be formalized with a Steering Committee, or obtained more informally. The key point is to take the input seriously – either use it or explain why not. These steps will increase commitment and help the project go more smoothly.

Skill #3: Use clear, two-way communication to explain why change is needed.
Time after time, when we ask leaders what they would do differently after a major change effort, they say, “Communicate more often and more effectively”. Time and effort invested in clarifying communications up-front pays off in significant downstream savings. It is especially important to make sure that the objectives and the business case for a project are understood, not just spoken or printed. So, communication needs to be a two-way street, and leaders at all levels should share responsibility for making sure people feel their voices are being heard.

Key Action Steps: Test drafts of objectives and business cases with a small group of managers and employees, and use their input to make communication clearer before releasing it to more people. Expect to make revisions. Establish a communication plan with regularly scheduled, two-way communication events such as town hall meetings and lunch-time discussions. Most importantly, be prepared to answer challenging questions when you communicate about significant changes. The test measures the degree to which people perceive you as trustworthy and able to create candor and respect with your audience. These steps will help minimize unexpected costs and delays.

Phase 2: Analyze Problem/Opportunity

This phase typically includes the following activities:

Define data that needs to be analyzed
Gather data (e.g. on problems, risks, costs, benefits, etc.)
Analyze data and develop solution requirements
Summarize analysis and conclusions

Following are some skills that are useful in leading change during analysis:

Skill #4: Employ different perspectives to fully analyze root causes.
Data analysis often seeks the root causes for problems. Using different perspectives helps ensure that this kind of analysis produces sustainable solutions. For example, looking through the three perspectives of business, people, and technology can lead to better conclusions about root causes. As a simple example, we can look at the common problem of “poor communications”, which may be due to any one or any combination of the following:

Inaccurate expectations about the audience
Inadequate business analysis of the problem/opportunity
Lack of listening or presentation skills
Technical problems with conveying information

If the problem is due to all these causes and any one of the perspectives is missed, the solution will be incomplete and therefore not effective. Identifying the right perspectives to use often requires stepping outside the bounds of project management to lead the path towards an alternative view of the problem.

Key Action Steps: When analyzing root causes of problems, consider what perspectives need to be taken into account before beginning the analysis. Then, use analysis methods that employ all the perspectives that are needed. This can be accomplished by involving people from different perspectives within your organization (e.g. individuals with backgrounds in business analysis and organizational change, as well as, the specific technical backgrounds related to the problem at hand; or consulting organizations that offer approaches using multiple perspectives). These steps will help produce solutions that last.

Skill #5: Avoid analysis paralysis.
One of the biggest dangers of analysis is the tendency to go into too much detail and prolong the process or add additional and unnecessary analysis. One reason for delay is that the analysis phase focuses attention on existing data, while solution development focuses on what hasn’t yet been created. Focusing on what isn’t yet known provokes anxiety in many individuals, and leads to “let’s do just one more analysis before we move on”. A second common reason is fear of failure. It is important to acknowledge and understand the reasons behind analysis paralysis and ensure the right project approach is in place to provide analysts with the sense of confidence and support they need to complete their work. In short, it takes leadership to acknowledge the dynamics leading to analysis paralysis and to take steps that address them.

Key Action Steps: Avoid over-analysis by clearly establishing the purpose of it, and by setting aggressive time boundaries. Also, allow for some time during analysis to think about solutions and record these ideas as they occur. This allows people to confront their anxiety step-by-step rather than all at once. Some of the best solution ideas will likely occur during analysis if allowed to come to the surface. Finally, intervene if analysis paralysis is taking place, and help analysts recognize the phenomenon and learn from the experience. By taking these steps, you will minimize project delays.

Phase 3: Solution Development

This phase typically includes the following:

Develop detailed requirements
Design solution architecture
Design, develop, and test prototypes
Scale-up prototype design to system level

Some skills that are useful in leading change during solution development are the following:

Skill #6: Provide an environment that fosters creativity.
The conditions that foster creativity are different from those that support analysis, and in many organizations creativity is counter-cultural. Leaders all too often greet creative ideas with messages that freeze creativity rather than fostering it, such as “that’s not logical”, “be practical”, “follow the rules”, and “we don’t want to hear about mistakes”. Effective change leaders are able to help people relax, focus, and follow new insights to develop creative solutions.

Key Action Steps: Spend some time every week with the people responsible for solution development. Listen to their work discussions and assess their level of creativity. Do people offer new ideas willingly? Do ideas come up that are “out of the box” or are they mostly based in traditional thinking? Are there diverse viewpoints represented on the team? Observe project leaders the team deals with directly. Do they say and do things that encourage constructive risk-taking? In many cases, innovative thinking will be required to produce business benefits from the project.

Skill #7: Change and integrate management infrastructure elements to support the solution.
Management infrastructure elements like reporting relationships, workflows, job descriptions, performance measures, and reward systems can reinforce each other in synergy or work against each other. For example, new IT or process solutions often require workflows and jobs to change. But changes to workflows and jobs may not “stick” if performance measures are not adjusted. Without changes to measures and performance feedback, people may continue to perform work just as they used to. As another example, changing some reporting relationships so that work can stay within departments instead of crossing them, can make or break a work process redesign. Yet changing reporting relationships without addressing staffing levels and promotions can be disastrous.

Key Action Steps: For each infrastructure element, ask, “How much impact will the solution have on this element?” (This often works well if done by a group that includes the managers and employees who are impacted by the solution). For those elements that are impacted significantly, consider what changes to infrastructure would create synergy and improve performance. Evaluate the cost/benefit of these changes, and implement those with a positive cost/benefit ratio and are essential for the project to produce results. The business press is a ready source of stories reporting failures resulting from projects whose leaders did not take these steps to change management infrastructure.

Phase 4: Solution Implementation

This phase typically includes the following:

Develop implementation plan
Secure implementation resources
Provide training
If appropriate, conduct pilot tests
Scale-up pilot to system-level implementation
Evaluate performance

Some skills that support leading change during implementation are as follows:

Skill #8: Deal with emotions as useful data. Many people in business settings are uncomfortable dealing with emotions. Some of our clients have asked us to use other words besides emotions or feelings, words like “concerns” and “issues.” Yet projects that produce significant organizational changes inevitably bring about feelings such as confusion, stress, anger, and loss. The desire to avoid dealing with emotions seems to be based on the assumption that feelings are messy and difficult to deal with and if we just ignore them they will go away on their own. Yet, anyone with significant experience in project management knows that negative emotions often don’t go away on their own. Instead, they sometimes linger and even fester, and cause real problems- the kind that slow or even stall projects. On the other hand, if people are supported in dealing with their feelings throughout a project, they can often work through them relatively quickly during deployment. Otherwise, the business results expected from the change may be delayed, and in some cases not achieved at all. Like the other skills described in this article, this may require some training, e.g. to distinguish between common emotions underlying “resistance to change” and feelings underlying conflicts that may be more deep-rooted.

Key Action Steps: Recognize that people’s feelings can contribute line item risk to your project’s success. Provide training for leaders in skills needed to facilitate transition – including skills for dealing with emotions - and take this training yourself if you haven’t already. These skills include active listening, recognizing behaviors that mark different stages of personal transition, expressing empathy, acknowledging loss, and being able to express one’s own feelings in ways that are appropriate to the business environment. This step will help retain talent that may otherwise be lost and help people work to their full potential.

Skill #9: Support organizational learning with structured debriefs.
Many projects don’t live up to their potential for providing learning due to a lack of planning and commitment. For example, although many projects use pilots and scripted walk-throughs during the implementation stage, few projects set expectations, allocate adequate time for learning, or use structured evaluations to identify and document lessons learned from these pilots and walk-throughs.

Key Action Steps: Plan periodic, structured debriefs or reviews during walk-throughs and pilots. Establish ground rules so that people will talk about mistakes without fearing they will be blamed or punished. Use data-gathering forms that make it easy to capture lessons learned, and end debriefs with commitments to take action based on this information. Most importantly, follow through on those commitments. These steps will help make important lessons from the project part of your organization’s useful knowledge base.

Strategic Project Leadership

This article has focused on “people skills” that increase the likelihood of project success. If combined, these skills contribute to project leadership (the actions that get people to do things because they want to, not because they have to), as well as project management.

After reading this, you may see the usefulness of doing some things differently on your project, or adding some additional project tasks. For example, you may choose to hold town hall meetings to improve two-way communications, conduct a survey to assess gaps in your organization’s readiness to make needed changes, and analyze the impacts a new system will have on the work that employees do. These types of tasks are often considered “Organizational Change Management” tasks, and they should be scoped, budgeted, and planned.

The key point to remember is that putting these types of tasks into a project plan does not mean that changes in attitudes and behavior can be controlled and predicted the same way that requirements analysis, software design, or equipment purchases can be. In sum, the uncertain nature of human change means there will always be a significant component of uncertainty and unpredictability in projects that impact people. Your awareness of this fundamental truth will help you make adjustments you need to make as unexpected events occur.

In conclusion, we believe that the kinds of “people skills” described in this article are straightforward, although the necessary actions require inspiration and courage to initiate and follow through. Making genuine organizational change happen always involves some risk as well as potential reward. That is why it calls for leadership, not just management.

While we have identified steps you need to take to make these skills more tangible, these steps are not necessarily additional work tasks. Rather, they point, more or less, to different ways of doing project management tasks that are already part of your plan.

People Skills Self-Assessment

*“To what extent am I able to:”*	RESPONSE SCALE 1= To a slight extent 2= To some extent 3= To a moderate extent 4= To a great extent
Facilitate Robust Dialogue:
1. Identify my own assumptions/underlying positions I take	1 2 3 4
2. Ask others to identify their assumptions in ways that help them do so without getting defensive	1 2 3 4
3. Avoid getting drawn into debate until assumptions have been clarified	1 2 3 4
Involve People in Planning:
4. Select the right people to involve at the right point in time	1 2 3 4
5. Manage their involvement so their buy-in increases without significantly slowing the project down	1 2 3 4
6. Follow through so people know if their input has been used or understand why not	1 2 3 4
Use Clear, Two-Way Communications:
7. Explain complex concepts so people understand	1 2 3 4
8. Listen and respond to questions and comments without getting defensive	1 2 3 4
9. Plan and manage presentations so there is plenty of time for questions and discussion	1 2 3 4
Employ Different Perspectives:
10. Recognize when an analysis could benefit from additional perspectives	1 2 3 4
11. Identify useful additional perspectives to bring in	1 2 3 4
12. Introduce different perspectives so subject matter experts accept rather than reject the additional expertise being offered	1 2 3 4
Avoid Analysis Paralysis:
13. Set a boundary by clearly establishing the purpose of the analysis	1 2 3 4
14. Determine if additional analyses are necessary or not	1 2 3 4
15. Recognize the signs that analysts are feeling anxious about their work	1 2 3 4
Foster Creativity:
16. Assess the level of creativity on a team	1 2 3 4
17. Reward constructive risk-taking even when it leads to dead-ends	1 2 3 4
18. Avoid messages that freeze rather than foster creativity	1 2 3 4
Change and Integrate Management Infrastructure:
19. Assess the impacts of the project to determine what infrastructure changes are needed	1 2 3 4
20. Assess the relationships between different infrastructure elements to determine how change in one element will require change in others to achieve the desired goals	1 2 3 4
21. Influence the appropriate leaders to drive the changes that are needed	1 2 3 4
Deal With Emotions as Useful Data:
22. Recognize what stage a person is at in relation to a transition at work	1 2 3 4
23. Listen empathetically and acknowledge negative emotions and then shift to a constructive discussion	1 2 3 4
24. Recognize and express my own feelings in constructive ways that use them as data about a situation without turning discussions into “gripe sessions” or other unproductive directions	1 2 3 4
Support Organizational Learning with Structured Debriefs:
25. Plan effectively for debriefs, allowing enough time and involving the right people	1 2 3 4
26. Establish ground rules so people will be able to talk about mistakes without fearing they will be blamed or punished	1 2 3 4
27. Support follow through so that lessons learned are put into practice	1 2 3 4

[1] Organizational Change Management has grown from clear roots in a variety of established social science disciplines, including Organizational Development and Organizational Behavior as well as Organizational Psychology, Sociology, and Anthropology.

[2] Over the past several decades, the field of project management has grown rapidly, and there are now several professional organizations (such as the Project Management Institute) who certify practitioners, plus numerous courses and programs in academic institutions (including schools of engineering and business) as well as professional training programs.

[3] While some terms in this article are often associated with information systems projects (requirements, prototype, solution, system, etc.), these terms and their related concepts can be applied to any type of project.