In life, there are moments that define people. For Al Haig, that moment came when he stepped to the podium and declared, “I am in control here.” For many people, that single event still shapes how they remember him and how they evaluate his tenure as Secretary of State.
Projects have defining moments too: key inflection points that shape not only the outcome of the effort, but also how the project and its leaders will ultimately be judged. The difference is that, unlike in life, these moments in projects are often predictable. If you prepare for the four hotspots where these defining moments tend to emerge, you can avoid many of the pitfalls that derail projects and undermine success.
Defining Moment #1: Conception
Projects are often conceived and “raised” by stakeholders before project managers even have a chance to touch them. By the time managers receive them, schedules and budgets may already exist. Those plans may live in project software or old Word documents. Governance and adoption processes may also already be established. That creates another success factor that appears outside the PM’s control.
It can feel as though project managers inherit their projects’ circumstances. After all, we cannot choose our parents or how they raise us. Project managers can seem similarly constrained by their projects’ beginnings.
According to a survey from 2007, 78% of employees involved in large, organization-wide initiatives believed they were working on a “doomed” project. Of those employees, 90% said they knew from the start that the project would fail to meet its goals.
But a fatalistic approach prevents improvement. The fact is that, regardless of your environment, you have an important role.
If you are in a good environment, your role is to execute the process that works. Your are responsible for bringing the project to success.
There is no excuse not to perform well.
If you’re in a poor environment, you cannot simply follow your normal routine and expect results. Your role is to improve the environment itself.
Remember: “Leadership is taken, not given.” If you wait for control of the project to come to you, chaos may already by underway.
So, how can you take the reins? Can you point out when the emperor has no clothes? Does the process itself need to change? Do you need to convince stakeholders to embrace that change? Would increased stakeholder support throughout the project benefit everyone involved?
As you can see, a good project manager is not simply someone who knows project management software, creates schedules, and builds reports. It takes expertise to diagnose systemic problems, courage to point them out, and soft skills to work through them with those who can improve the system.
Defining Moment #2: Early Signs of Trouble
Project managers are tasked with working against their natural instincts. It is human nature to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Project managers must do the opposite. When there is a problem, or even the potential for one, resist the instinct to procrastinate. Enter it into the risk log while there is still time to prevent it. Hope is not a strategy; address the pain before it takes hold.
The earlier you recognize a potential problem, the easier it is to identify patterns in your project management data. This allows you to address issues before they become real delays.
More importantly, early recognition gives you more options. During a project definition, you can increase the budget, extend timelines, adjust scope, or monitor risk areas.
If addressed during project initiation, you may already have high-level specifications. However, you can prioritize the areas requiring most time, money, and attention.
In this case, thoughtful planning can still reduce the risks caused by poor planning. Even after project execution begins, you can re-baseline and adjust the project management plan.
If you simply avoid the pain until is becomes reality, you will be left with no recourse. You will wonder what went wrong instead of preparing to prevent it. Realized risks cost time, effort, and money to resolve. In that case, a project will either miss its targets, make significant sacrifices in certain areas, or be cancelled altogether. This is why an honest risk register can be an unsung hero for projects.
Stakeholder Rapport: Scope Change and Impact Analysis
Being proactive might sound like a truism, but it is easier said than done. The challenge is that addressing problems early means becoming the bearer of bad news before execution even begins. Not only are you taking on the pain yourself, but you are also bringing it to others, which will not always be appreciated. It is much easier to lie low and keep your slate clean until there is a reason to rock the boat.
Many organizations have a “shoot the messenger” culture. Executives have enough real problems to deal with, and you have the gall to bring them hypothetical ones? Building stakeholder rapport can help create an environment where risks are addressed instead of ignored.
The most important painful topic to address during initiation is scope change and impact analysis. This includes how new requests move from hallway conversations to informal notes to signed business requirement documents. When stakeholders return during execution with new requirements, they will not want to hear that changes require impact analysis. However, that analysis protects the project because changes will cost money and time. If issues arise during execution that require negotiating the triple constraint, stakeholders will understand if you explain it early. Let them know during initiation that a project can only be two out of three: better, faster, cheaper.
We’d be foolish to guarantee that this conversation will go over well. However, any anchor you face now will be much greater after planning is complete. This conversation can create an opportunity for stakeholders to consider tolerances around scope, budget, and schedule. It can also clarify the project charter everyone is working from.
Confronting pain
There’s no way around it: being proactive will involve confronting, and sometimes creating, pain. Change management will always require negotiating an arm of the Iron Triangle. You cannot have better, faster, and cheaper. An impact analysis will require time and money, and change management will always involve compromise.
Effective leaders must operate in the gray area, negotiating the optimal solution. Notice we say “optimal” and not “perfect” because there will not be a perfect solution. As the saying goes, negotiation is done right when both sides are dissatisfied. The problem-solving itself is often not the toughest part of this process. It takes soft skills to make everyone agreeable to the solution.
Defining Moment #3: Taking (and Maintaining) Control
The best indication of effective project management is whether the project manager has control of the project. When you ask project managers if they are in control, they often respond, “I feel like it is going well.” However, control is not a matter of opinion; it is an objective measure. You either maintain execution processes on a regular, cyclical basis by collecting actuals for cost, labor, and schedule, or you do not.
This is not to say that other factors do not influence project success. Some projects within control will still fail, while others out of control flail their way to success. The goal is to maximize your success rate. You do that by satisfying the objective criteria for project control.
“Taking control” sounds forceful, but this should not be a hostile takeover. Leaders can take control in a frictionless and seamless way during execution by maintaining a natural cadence. Think of the project manager’s role like a game of tennis and the objective is to always keep the balls off your side of the net.
You do this through the combined use of your work, tools, and process. Complete your own tasks, and for the areas of the project outside your control, use task management applications and project management software to assign tasks out to the people responsible for those areas. (And if there’s no one responsible for a given area, then escalate the issue and get the help you need). When you handle the next steps assigned to you, the “balls” return in a regular rhythm.
The reason it works is because it leaves no room for the blame game. When everyone completes 75% of their tasks, both sides blame each other for the remaining 25%. However, when you go into meetings with all your boxes checked, the team knows any remaining issues are theirs. Before long, everyone tends to follow along.
Maintaining control
If you feel that “tends to” is doing a lot of work in the last paragraph, then that’s a good sign that you’re grounded in the real world where things change and conflicts arise. Even when everyone does what they should, projects rarely cruise to success by following the plan perfectly. Customers will add requirements, servers will go down, and resources will perform below expectations..
If companies conducted postmortems on failed projects, scope creep would likely be the most common cause of project failure. As the saying goes, large projects fall a year behind one day at a time. Massive project reconfigurations usually result from a mixture of denial and negligence by the project manager. Project managers who keep their fingers on the project’s vital signs can accommodate the unforeseen. They can revise the plan, re-baseline, and create contingencies. But hope is not a strategy. When scope creeps and project managers deny the warning signs, problems materialize. These problems attack all three arms of the iron triangle: exceeded budgets, missed deadlines, and unmet specifications.
This is where Defining Moment #2 becomes important over and over again: monitoring warning signs in the project. You maintain control over a project by noticing when adjustments are necessary and remaining adaptable to meet the current moment.
In this way, Defining Moments #2 & 3 work in a cyclical way. The key to maintaining control in a project is to monitor signs of trouble, take control, rinse and repeat until you reach project closeout.
Defining Moment #4: Closing the Deal
We’ve been emphasizing proaction throughout this article, so the real secret to successful closeout should come as no surprise. Success in the preceding processes is what truly enables a successful closeout.
Whatever problems remain unresolved from Definition, Initiation, and Execution will snowball and accumulate during Closeout. When the project charter contains unclear completion criteria and an inconsistent or missing business requirement document, problems emerge. You may deliver what you think you promised, but customers may not receive what they expected. To borrow a football analogy: when you fail to incrementally close out parts of the project during execution, you rely on a Hail Mary. Success is most sustainable when you string together a series of first downs.
Of course, some responsibilities do not begin until Closeout. For example, you must follow up on out-of-scope activities and hand off to stakeholders. However, Closeout is a defining moment for proactive leaders who addressed problems as early as possible. This is where leaders who took the reins begin to shine. Conversely, managers who never gained control of the project begin to feel the pain they sought to avoid.
Conclusion
These are the four hotspots that have derailed so many projects. Avoid them, and your defining moment will be a triumph—and your project will be too.
Our full white paper on Leadership Is Taken, Not Given is available here.
