24# - Why Less is More in Projects and in Project Management

“If you want to make sure something doesn’t get done…. make it a project.”

This is a statement that I have heard several times from senior executives. In the Project Economy, which is our world driven by change, almost all organizations have way much more projects that they can manage and implement successfully, which leads to high rates of failure, millions of investments wasted and benefits not delivered.

This exponential growth in projects is also one of the main reasons behind the Great Resignation. When the focus was on operations people worked hard but were not overwhelmed. If projects are not properly prioritized and supervised by senior leaders, they lead to employees being overwhelmed, frustrated, and losing interest in their jobs.

Here is a look at how to change that.

Over the years, I have found that the word?“project” is a term that is extensively used yet largely misunderstood. This phenomenon generates two issues, which have an impact on the success rate of projects:

Many activities, which traditionally had been performed through normal day-to-day time, are now labeled projects.?This exponentially increases the number of projects in an organization. Not long ago, I did some work for a leading retail company. They had 78 staff, 7 executives, yet, they had a list of more than 200 projects, on top of their day-to-day activities. More projects than employees, just incredible! And this disease affects today almost every organization, which creates several collateral damages, one of them around prioritization, a topic I will address in a future post.

I believe that you can cancel up to 80% of the projects in an organization and nothing will happen.

If you apply project management techniques to all of your projects, you will be increasing complexity, growing costs, and creating extra governance committees to some undertakings that don’t need it.?A key data point to remember is that “project management is not for free.” On average, you should add 5 percent to 10 percent extra cost to the activity for the dedicated management, the monitoring, the reporting, and the extra governance.

Before tackling more complex issues, it is important that we all share the same understanding of what a project is and what it is not.

There are plenty of definitions out there, starting from PMI’s Project Management Body of Knowledge?: “A project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service or result. A project is temporary in that it has a defined beginning and end in time, and therefore defined scope and resources.”

ISO 10006 states: “Unique process consisting of a set of co-ordinated and controlled activities with start and finish dates, undertaken to achieve an objective conforming to specific requirements, including constraints of time, cost and resources”. As you can see, both definitions are quite wordy and hard to grasp at first.

Here is one definition I have often used: “A?project is a new undertaking with a specific goal, a limited budget, and a target end date often involving different units of the organization.” The key is not to get fixated on trying to find the perfect definition, I recommend developing your own project definition based on your current practices and one that resonates with your people.

Here is how I define a "project" in one of my LinkedIn courses.

The second part, which is even more important than the common definition, is to set some clear and objective criteria of what is a project (changing-the-business), and what should be considered as day-to-day activities (or what I call, running-the-business). Here as well there are different theories; yet, I tend to be very pragmatic as often there is no black or white answer in what we do. I generally establish some criteria that define what a project is for an organization. Here is a real example (values will change depending of the organization):

• Size of the project in terms of budget (e.g. above 500.000 USD)
• Size in terms of duration (e.g. between 6 to 18 months)
• More than 100 mandays
• At least three units/departments impacted
• Linked to a corporate or departmental strategic priority

Those projects that will comply with these criteria usually are the most strategic ones for the organization, and have to be managed by professional project managers, using project management best practices. They will also require setting up the right governance structure and monitoring mechanism to ensure the project is well executed.

Take Action:

1. Agree on a few common criteria for defining what a project is and what it is not.
2. Apply the criteria to remove projects from your extensive list of projects.
3. Remember that applying project management adds extra costs, so apply it smartly to those projects that are relevant for your organization.

Benefits:

1. Less ambiguity of what is a project.
2. Significant less amount of projects.
3. The most strategic projects should be better planned, staffed, and managed, which leads to an overall increase in project success.

The retail company which I referred to at the beginning of my post, implemented these actions and after a few months, they reduced the number of projects from 200 to 30, which made a huge difference for them to manage them more successfully.

As always, curious to hear your views and experience on this topic.

Stay well and hasta la vista!

Antonio