How to regain control of an out-of-control project

A couple of years ago I had the opportunity to work in Luxemburg with my good friend Herman, it was a very interesting project where we did interact quite a lot with one of the big management consulting companies.

One day I and Herman were having a coffee when one of these fancy consultants came to us and asked for our help in one of the projects since they were 10 months late and did not have a clue when it would be ready.

He and I started to smile wondering why on earth companies still hire these guys for Digital Transformations since most of them are kids coming out of university without any experience (we all know why they still hire them but let's not go there).

Since our main priority was to help the customer we did agree to help this poor consultant. The project was completely out of control and he could not predict when it would be finished, meanwhile, his company had 23 consultants sucking money out of our customers ;)

So Herman started:

You know first thing is to visualise everything that's going on within the project.

Consultant:

We have that we have our Microsoft Project and Excel.

I and Herman could not stop laughing and said to him: Great you can put that crap in the garbage. Meet us tomorrow at 10:00 in the XPTO meeting room, be ready to bring some tape and a lot of A4 paper and tape.

The poor consultant completely lost, did agree, the next day we meet him.

The first thing you will do is to map all the phases of the project on the wall and of course all the work ongoing, and the backlog.?

We will do a huge kanban wall and visualise everything, this is a waterfall project but does not matter, let's visualise what's going on.

A couple of hours after we had a 16 meters wall with all the different phases of the project and with all the pieces. Then we started to ask the guy to use his brilliant Excel and tell us how long it took each piece of work in each different phase.

Soon enough we had a pretty good feeling of how long each piece took in each different phase, more, with that information we could predict the entire duration of the project.?

Of course not in a very accurate way but good enough to see that in the best-case scenario the project would be delivered 3 years after the deadline resulting in hundreds of millions of euros in penalties.

With this information, we were able to call the executive leaders of that company and explain to them the solution, immediately they understand what was going on since they had a 16 meters wall in front of them explaining everything.

I explained that we would never be able to deliver everything on time, and the solution would be to prioritise the parts of the project that would save us the biggest amount of fines, in other words: the biggest cost of delay. With this information, they could negotiate with the legal entities and manage expectations in a better way.

They followed that suggestion and were able to deliver the project without fines. Of course, the big management consulting got all the reputation but to be honest we really do not care, we helped the customer and they still call us today ;)

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PS: If you follow my work for some time you know that Herman is a fictitious person that I use to illustrate some of my views in this crazy world we live in :)

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