CHAPTER THREE: HOLDING ON TO YOUR GAINS
In which the hard and soft criteria of project success are established.


"So what do people say once it's over?" Asks Franck. He's stopped smiling now and looks at me as if he is hungry for a meal. He seems so serious over the problem that I get the feeling that he thinks that the meal is going to be me.

"It depends on who you ask." I reply. "The classical measures of project success are Time - Cost - and Specification. The client is usually most concerned with the first two whilst the end user is usually most interested in specification. That is, 'does it do what we intended it to do for us?'. However, I find more that these days for business projects, clients are often as interested in revenues as costs. The additional revenue from a new product development can often far outweigh the costs. Also clients are more interested in the timeliness than time itself. To use the new product example again, as long as they beat the competition to the window of opportunity, the exact timing is not as important as its timeliness."

I plough on in a steady stream. "But there are other groups of people who also have comments to make about project success. The person or steering group which owns or sponsors the project usually has a view. Their measure of success is usually in relation to them. Deciding how much political hassle it has been to push the project through? Furthermore, there is the project team, who try to assess whether they enjoyed the experience and would be willing to go through it with the project leader again. The accountants, who are still upset because you didn't spend, on what you said you would, when you said you would. And then there are the senior managers, whose noses are put out of joint because you have crossed into their patch unknowingly and they are determined to kill your project stone dead."

"Whoa! Slow down, slow down" he says, waving his arms up and down. "It seems to me that lots of people hold a stake in the project."

"Well yes but the only important one is the client, as long as we can keep the client happy..."

"You just told me," says Franck steadily, "that sometimes when you are half way through a project suddenly, out of the blue, you have received an angry or aggressive memo or a rocketing from some senior manager or say union official or someone else who you thought had nothing at all to do with your project?"

I'm thrown by the question. I'm sure I didn't mention the rude memos. How does Franck know about them? The answer to his question is yes. Yes. Frequently. It's a horrible feeling, just as things are getting going on the project, out of the blue, like a bolt of lightning, it strikes you. It leaves you disoriented, annoyed and confused, and not wanting to read memos or answer the phone for a while. They usually start 'I have just heard...' And if you don't handle them right they will fight you and obstruct you for the rest of the project. I reply softly, "Yes."

He probes. "Why does this happen?"

"I don't know." I reply perplexed. "I guess, they seem to think that the project is something to do with them."

Franck continues to probe. "How does this same thing happen over and over and over?"

"Busybodies?" I venture.

"I don't think so." He says flatly. "Go back to what you said before. "

"What?" I ask. "You mean 'that they think that the project has something to do with them'?"

He nods. "Yes and what do you think?"

"That it doesn't." I say slowly, as I begin to understand his point.

"And who's right? He pauses and waits for a reply from me. I know he's right but don't reply. Eventually he continues. "It seems to me that there are a lot of people who have a stake and there are even more than you think."

"Yes." I agree, "There are a lot of stakeholders." "I sometimes feel like Dracula's assistant, Igor, constantly watchful and alert, trying to avoid an army of vampire killers who are determined to drive a stake through the heart of my project."

Franck laughs and calls the waiter over.

"Yes." I say thoughtfully, "You're definitely right. There are a lot of stakeholders. Some have a financial or organisational stake in the outcome. For example, the client or sponsor who is actually paying for the project is the person who is really driving the change. They tend to drive it towards the outcomes they want. Other people may be interested in the outcome but they may not be in the driving seat. For example, the sales department, which will grow as a result of the project, are betting on you to succeed. However the people who will lose out as a result of the project also have a stake and wish for you to fail."

"Are some stakeholders more concerned with what happens during the project than the outcome."

"Who do you mean?"

"How about the ones who are holding and steadying a ground stake for you to hit?"

I look at him completely puzzled.

"Your team, I mean," says Franck.

I nod vigorously. "And all the favours I need to call in, from across the organisation." "It is when you need to rely on work from people over whom you have no responsibility or authority, that you realise something which is probably true for every stakeholder."

"What's that?" He asks.

"It also seems that some people are more interested in the softer measures of how things are done rather than the harder measures of what is done." "Receiving favours, generating motivation and enthusiasm, are far more dependent on how you dealt with people last time round." "Did you share the whole vision with them so that they could understand where their contribution fitted in?" "Did you thank them?" "Did you make them do pointless work?" "Were your instructions useful and clear?" "How you worked with them, has a far more profound impact on them, than informing them that the project or the tasks are going along to time cost and quality."

Franck leans across the table to fill my glass, as he does this that hungry look comes over his features again, and in a firm voice he repeats the question he had asked me five minutes earlier. "So?" he asks conspiratorially, "What do people say once it's over?"

With my new insight I reply, speaking slowly, to make sure I get it right. "There are many stakeholders with different success criteria. However they fall into three groups." "Some focus on the tasks delivered by the project and look at the hard and tangible outcomes in order to establish how they and the business will be affected by the change." "In a business context their concern is with the financial contribution of the project, its timeliness in providing competitive advantage, and whether it delivers the specific technical and business objectives it was set up for."

Others are primarily concerned with the way in which they are managed, influenced and involved during the project. This group, responsible for delivering the change, usually involves the core team, all the other direct and indirect contributors to the project (including external suppliers and subcontractors). They are measuring success against their own personal feelings, levels of motivation and the learning and development that they get out of the project. In most modern projects this group is far more important than you might think because you usually have to work with them again in the future and they can have a significant influence over the rest of your career by actively or passively preventing you from succeeding the next time round, or simply by bad mouthing you to future teams and as a result, making it difficult for you to get their enthusiasm."

The third group are primarily concerned with both the outcomes of the project and how well they think that they have been managed during the project. Usually this group includes the client, end users and the project sponsor or steering group. For them, success is a measure of how all their expectations, both hard and soft have been met throughout the project.


"Good", says Franck, "So now we know what you are trying to avoid in projects". "But that's only the first step, now we need to work our way backwards systematically to find out what skills or knowledge that all project managers lack, or let's be generous, which they fail to use consistently."

"Let's start by trying to understand the business part of the problem." "So, tell me, what do you think is the most common cause of problems with timeliness, money or specification?"

"I don't think that it is as simple as that," I reply, trying not to show my surprise at how naive he seems to be. "If there is one cause then I would say that it is the lack of planning."

He looks straight at me and says provocatively, "So what you are telling me is that all well-planned projects deliver the three business requirements?"

An image flashes through my mind. It is the image of my second ever project, the one on the construction site. I remember the portakabin where we had our tea breaks on rainy days. The cabin had been about thirty feet long and about ten wide. All the way round the walls at two levels three feet high there had been a band of steadily yellowing paper, our project plan. I remember someone telling me that it had taken a year to work out in detail all the tasks that had to carried out and the order in which they had to be done. When I saw it, it was already one year out of date, the tasks we were working on bore no relation to what was on the wall. Many of the tasks which were represented as being one-offs we had in fact done several times over either because we made mistakes in carrying them out or because they had been wrongly specified in some way. We had had plenty of planning but once things started to go wrong they had simply gone from bad to worse and it had been impossible to keep the plan up to date with the changes.

I finally reply. "No." "And furthermore, even with excellent plans something unforeseen may occur." "You need to know the status of the project all the time and be able to catch up or change your plans." "This can be made even worse by tasks which are done wrong or have to be repeated to meet specifications."

"You've given me four common causes, are there any more?"

"Yes, there is one more, the original financial or duration estimates may have been wrong or the specifications very demanding or unachievable, so that when you deliver the possible you are still seen to have failed."

Franck takes a pen out of his top pocket and starts to make notes on the napkin. He writes:
money: cost too much or not enough revenue
duration: late or not timely
wrong: results or doesn't work as hoped


estimates wrong don't know can't catch up errors tasks redone
or impossible status of or change
specification project at plans
any time



"What are you doing?" I ask.

"Blowing bubbles," he replies, and without pausing, continues, "on projects where tasks are repeated often, what else happens?"

"You mean apart from being late and overshooting on budget?"

"Yes," he confirms.

I explain. "The people working on the tasks get fed-up. If they get bored, as well, then their attention to detail tends to decrease and as a result they make more mistakes." "All the people waiting to receive the outputs of the tasks become impatient." "Their confidence in what is to be produced by the project starts to fall. They may lose interest in the project all together or it may fall down their priority list." "If the task is for the client and it is redone several times, this is often enough to turn the client off you and it may become impossible to win future business."
He looks up at me from the napkin he has been writing on and asks, "Does this happen often?"

"Yes," I reply, "all the time."

Franck writes 'team?' and 'contributors fed-up' and then adds two arrows to his scribbles, one from tasks redone to contributors fed-up and one from contributors fed-up to errors. "Do you find that once a team starts redoing tasks all your plans get increasingly out of control?" he asks me.

"Yes," I reply, "sometimes the only way to overcome the problem is to change the people involved." "How do you know about that problem?"

"Just a hunch," he says cryptically. "Tell me, what else do your two groups of stakeholders say at the end?"

Realising how much I have gained from the last ten minutes, how much the pieces are starting to come together, simply because I have more fully defined the needs of the organisation, I am thoughtful as I answer. "Well, you can end up with an unhappy or demotivated project team. By project team I mean my core team, who help me run the project and are very closely associated with it, the working team made up of those who are supposed to be working on the project and all those people whose goodwill I have relied upon."

"You mean your invisible friends?" he says.

I laugh at the idea, "I suppose you could call them that! It's a great title. Just like childhood when your parents couldn't see your invisible friend, but you could and you knew what they were up to all the time. I definitely agree." I giggle. "Let me introduce you to my army of invisible friends. Meet ...The Invisible Team."

Franck grins. The waiter sidles up to us, in as obvious a fashion as possible, clears his throat and demands, in French, "Are you ready to order yet?" For the first time in four hours I notice our surroundings. It looks as if all the day trippers have left. The other clientele are dressed for an evening out. I turn back to face Franck who shrugs. He rises from his chair and says, "Just let me make a 'phone call and then maybe we can stay on and grab a bite to eat."

Whilst he's gone I try to use the time to prepare for the next part of our discussion. I'm enjoying the way it is going. To be honest, I am rather surprised at the interest he has taken in my problem. I've always thought of it as a rather specialised problem. I had not expected anyone unconnected with projects to have had the slightest interest. After all, Franck was only a teacher, or what was it he called himself, an 'Educator'?

I notice the napkin he's been scribbling on and reach across the table to pick it up. "What a crazy way to make notes," I think. The diagram is untidy. It looks like a pile of spaghetti. Arrows cross each other, one set goes round in a circle. I follow the circle round, reading it out softly to myself, "Errors ---> tasks redone -->team fed-up --> reduced attention to detail -->errors." "What on earth does that mean?" Then I remember Franck's question, the one which had surprised me, and my answer.

He'd asked. "Do you find that once a team starts redoing tasks all your plans get increasingly out of control?"

And I had replied "Yes. Sometimes the only way to overcome the problem is to change the people involved. How do you know about that problem?"

"The sly goat!" I jerk my head up. "So that's how he knew." I had told him myself. He obviously has some shorthand way of writing down what I say and then pieces it all together and feeds it back to me. Of course, if errors lead to tasks being redone and redone tasks lead to the team getting fed-up, and a fed-up team tends to pay less attention to detail then this will lead to more errors being made. Once that starts it's obvious that it will snowball, getting steadily worse. That was just typical of Franck, always pulling a fast one of some sort.

Just then he returns to the table and sits down, I'm restrained, not eager to let him in onto what I have just discovered. He notices the napkin in front of me and asks, "Trying to decipher my hieroglyphics?"

"I think I may have made some progress," I reply, but I can't resist asking, "how does it work?"

"We've only just started," he says "I'll explain it later when we have made some real progress." Then he looks at me in an apologetic way. "I'm afraid that the explanation will have to wait though." "I have to go and can't stay for dinner. Maybe we can meet again?"