The Elements of Project Success (Part 1)

Even the most experienced project managers aren’t immune to the more common and destructive reasons for project collapses. Poor time and budget performance, failure to deal with complexity, uncontrolled changes in scope . . . they can catch anyone off guard.

Performance-based Project Management can help radically improve your project’s success rate despite the obstacles that may try to undermine it.

Readers will discover how they can increase the probability of project success, detailing a step-by-step plan for avoiding surprises, forecasting performance, identifying risk, and taking corrective action to keep a project successful. Project leaders wishing to stand out among their peers continually hampered by unexpected failures will learn how to assess the business capabilities needed for a project.

• Plan and schedule the work
• Determine the resources required to complete on time and on budget
• Identify and manage risks to success
• Measure performance in units meaningful to decision-makers

By connecting mission strategy with project execution, this invaluable resource for project managers in every industry will help bring projects to successful, career-enhancing completion.

Project success is elusive in all business and technical domains, including software development, construction, new drug development, projects involving multiple participants, irregular funding, and emerging requirements.

To increase the probability of project success, we must start with principles and apply practices implemented by processes. These principles are necessary for the practices and processes to have a home.

These principles are based on the following:

1.?Identify the technical and operational capabilities needed for the success of the project, mission, or business case. These need to be measured in units of effectiveness and performance.

• Effectiveness is operational measures of success that are closely related to the achievements of the mission or operational objectives evaluated in the operational environment under a specific set of conditions. These measures are stated in units meaningful to the buyer, focus on capabilities independent of any technical implementation, and are traceable to Mission Success.
• Performance measures characterize physical or functional attributes relating to system operation, measured or estimated under specific conditions. These measures assure the system's ability to perform the mission and assess the system's ability to meet the design requirements and satisfy the Measures of Effectiveness.

2.?Construct the sequence in which these capabilities will be delivered to maximize business value, minimize risk, and maximize opportunities to make improvements.

• This sequence must be detailed enough to determine dependencies but not so detailed as to inhibit easy changes as we discover new requirements to fulfill the capabilities.
• The chart below shows a sequence of capabilities for a health insurance provider network ERP system. Each capability can be incrementally put into the business as it is delivered.

3.?With the sequence of work in place, we can now look for risks and opportunities for improvement. Risk is created by uncertainty. Uncertainty comes in two flavors:

• Reducible uncertainty – these risks can be reduced by spending money, changing or plans, or creating alternatives. Formally these uncertainties that create the risk are epistemic. This is risk related to the lack of knowledge about the situation. We can pay for more knowledge.
• Irreducible uncertainty – these risks cannot be reduced with more knowledge. They are dependent on chance. No increase in information can reduce the risk.

4.?With sequenced capabilities, risk-handling plans, and opportunity plans, we can now determine the cost and schedule of the work needed to deliver the capabilities. This work starts with packages of work holding the budget for the job and describing the performance period.? This result shows us the cost needed to produce each capability. This cost can be compared to the benefits of the capability to confirm the business case or mission strategy.

5.?For each chunk of work in the plan to implement the needed capabilities, we need some method to measure the progress of our plan. These measures must be based on tangible evidence of physical percent complete. This can be done through three basic approaches:

• 0/100 – we’re done, or we’re not done. Nothing in between.
• 50/50 – we’ll get 50% for starting and 50% when we’re done.
• Quantifiable backup data – a series of milestones with tangible evidence of completion, each representing some pre-defined percent complete.

Each of these assessments of progress to plan is based on pre-defined units of measures. This differs from the opinion of progress on projects stuck at 80% to 90% complete.

Conclusion

We need to know what DONE looks like, how we’re going to arrive at DONE on time, on budget, with the planned capabilities, what resources, funding, and work sequences we need, what risk handling and opportunity management can be performed, and how we’re going to measure tangible physical percent complete along the way.