Does Project Completion Equal Project Success?

Imagine you’re sitting at your desk staring at an email you just completed to your customer that states the last contractually required item is shipping. You take a minute to reflect on all the hard work, the long hours, the never-ending challenges, the unplanned budget growth, the schedules that constantly seemed to slip, all before you hit send and you think to yourself that it’s finally complete. You take a deep breath, review your grammar once more and hit send all while feeling a sense of relief and are overwhelmingly proud of your team’s accomplishments over the life of the project. You go out to address your team and give recognition and encouragement to all and empower them to continue the hard work on the follow-on project.

However, after the celebration is over and the dust settles as you enter the project closeout stage. You learn from a financial standpoint that you were within your budget and increased your profitability. From a scheduling standpoint, you delivered on time and hit all your milestones. But the deeper you dive in the lessons learned, you start to ask yourself if this project was truly a success even though it was completed on time and within budget. Was the proposal that went through 5 rounds of negotiations, the material that didn’t get ordered on time and lead times increased from original quotes during the proposal phase, the oversight of internal requirements and actual resource utilization to name a few a disservice to the overall project? You decide to go deeper into the lessons learned and document where the challenges throughout the project occurred. You ask yourself if you could have been more involved in each process, was there a lack of encouragement on your part, a communication breakdown, little emphasis on the urgency of the deliveries, etc.

The proposal phase will mostly set the tone for the project. You are working closely with your customers defining the requirements, setting an appropriate timetable, and presenting the fair and reasonable cost that is required to deliver the product or service. The relationship can either strengthen or deteriorate during the negotiations based off the impression of the proposal complying within the customer's needs or being way off the mark. The communications that are documented within this phase should be reviewed at the project closeout stage and evaluated on how messages were received. If there were communication break downs, ask yourself where they occurred and how can you improve upon your message for future negotiations.

Upon award, the best way to communicate all aspects of the contract and expectations of the project team is the kickoff meeting. All decision maker team members should be in attendance and should come armed with questions and any concerns they may anticipate throughout the life of the project. From a lessons learned perspective, one way to ensure you created an effective kickoff is to review the presentation and the meeting minutes with a higher level of detail. Was the initial presentation in that meeting relevant to what happened throughout the project and were the questions/concerns comparable to the challenges that were presented? If not, tailor future kickoff meetings and lead the discussion by reviewing past projects and how to alleviate any of the issues that were presented.

During the execution stage of the project, there will be challenges that may or may not present themselves during the kickoff. If your project requires material or software, there may be lead time issues based on the popularity of the item or if the item requires material that is either obsolete or on back order. When you finally receive your material, you may find it’s non-conforming and the vendor may need to either rework or start from new. Once the material received in is good to use, you may find that your test team is finding failures they have never experienced before. After the items can finally be tested, you may find that there’s a snowstorm outside stalling all shipments delaying contractual requirements. The list can go on and on, but the common item is that there are opportunities in each phase for improvement. Material or software requests can be flowed to your vendor prior to contract award to get their forecast in line with your requirements to lessen lead time issues. Test failures can be approved upon by having your team’s engineers and your vendor’s engineers work together in the same lab to understand and develop a path forward to alleviate any failures. Lastly, no you can’t control the weather, but you can control your level of communication with your customer if you anticipate any anomaly prior to the disruptive event.

Not all projects are like this and share the same struggles, but each project between the start and completion has challenges that the Project Manager and their respected team can learn from. True project success should experience improvement in all processes at all stages of the project to ensure your team is consistently growing and evolving for future projects. As a PM, communication and leadership styles will enhance naturally project to project as you gain experience. Your growth shouldn’t be determined by completing the objective of shipping on time and within budget, but by examining every step of the process and finding ways to improve. If you weren’t as involved in the procurement process for your material orders on the last project and saw possible efficiencies, ensure you dedicate more personal attention to that very process going forward. If you saw that there were quality issues with the material purchased from subcontractors, take a trip to their facility to understand their process and what kind of improvements they are making to reduce quality issues. There are always opportunities to improve whether it may seem nominal, but as the project manager, take the initiative to create an environment that emphasizes growth.