Program Management for chaotic Start-ups

“Start-up” means setting something in motion. Often, this setting up in motion is hard enough that people forget that keeping it in motion is harder. Majority of startups die in the first 18 months of their existence. While there are many reasons why startups fail,?nearly 30-40% of startups of failure are usually due to lack of effective program management and/or realizing the importance of program management too late in the game. In this post, I want to elaborate why program management is essential for your startup, what symptoms can help you identify that your startup is ready to establish program management and some key benefits for it.?

Why do you need Program Management??

Startups are usually fast-paced in nature, with numerous pressing issues to deliver with limited resources. This often prompts them to take shortcuts and cut corners. They are heavily biased for action, hence a quick fix is often favored over scalable foundations. As a result, they unwillingly sacrifice long-term success for short-term ease. Although they should expect to move fast 85% of the time, few topics require strategic and procedural thoughtfulness more than speed. At the same time, startups also have little margin for error to deliver projects on time and within budget. This focus on speed in startups makes one assume that they should need less program management discipline than established companies but it could not be far from truth. After years of advising teams and working with early-stage startups, I would argue that the success of a startup is even more dependent on planning, effective communication, delivering value to stakeholders, and efficiently running operations with limited funding and resources. Hence, program management holds more value for startups than mid and large cap companies. It’s not a matter of “if” a company needs program management, it’s a matter of “when”. While it's hard to stipulate set rules around when to set up program management in your startup, it is much easier to identify systemic issues that may signal that your company is ready for it.

Symptoms that your org needs program management

When I joined Meta(formerly Facebook) data center connectivity org back in 2017, it was a relatively small operations team with about 20 people. While it was a small team supporting the Meta data center org, it was delivering large scale multi-million dollar projects but there were concerns around schedules and deep-rooted issues related to its ability to scale. The team worked as a startup in the broader data center org and had very little thought put into processes and most of the planning and execution was ad-hoc, non-standardized formats pulled together in spreadsheets and duct tapes.

As an early program manager in data center connectivity org, I was initially tasked to establish a program for schedulers. While ramping up, I observed that there were consistent slips in monthly project delivery timelines, communication across the org was spotty and there were clear stakeholder misalignments which was showing the cracks in the organization. On further digging, I realized that the root cause was that the financial forecast accuracy was bad(<30%) i.e. there was a huge variance between planned financials vs actual cost. This resulted in a series of change order submissions, which in turn created a domino effect, creating further mis-alignment within cross functional teams, and resulted in competing priorities amongst stakeholders (including schedulers). As much as there was a lack of process, there was also an abundance of tools like MS project, Excel, Asana, Oracle P6 etc. which eventually made it even harder for the operations team to reconcile and evaluate the overall health of data center programs. As I wrote my own retrospective, I reconciled that the key symptoms that plague organizations that require effective program management are:?

• Continued slippage in schedules without reasons rooted in tangibles(actual delays due to supply chain etc).
• Stakeholder alignment took 50% or more time of the actual project execution.?
• Stakeholders were raising questions about strategy and direction consistently even after buy-in.?
• Individual contributors lacked clarity in prioritization across multiple silo orgs.

How to establish an effective Program Management???

There is no one size fits all in program management. It really depends on org, velocity, results and culture of the organization. Often the first step to changing anything is to establish a retrospective about why processes may be failing. The key is to give every stakeholder a voice and ability to share their perspective. You can achieve this by outlining the landscape of the ecosystem, have 1:1 with stakeholders and survey with teams.?

As a second step, focus on small wins to earn trust with the team, ensure the recommendations are taken into the account before proposing the next steps (and/or a new process) to stakeholders with a clear buy-in from each. Remember, they are the ones championing the change and ensuring they feel empowered by the process, not the need to adhere to it by compulsion.?

Next, ensure the team has the right skill set for the program managers being put-in to execute the duties. They could be technical/non-technical, may be a visionary, executor or co-ordinator (read more here about types of Program Managers). I often see teams with too many PMs but nobody has the skills to actually evaluate tactical/ground-level work. Remember, a great program manager will make a team of 12-20 people 3X more effective, whereas a bad one will become a liability.?

As a last step, before the change is implemented, please ensure it is timed right to ensure day-to-day operations for business continuity of your company/org.?

Here are key strategies I recommend every startup to implement if you feel it’s time that your startup needs more discipline as you scale:?

• Planning: “Every minute you spend in planning saves ten minutes in execution,” claims Brian Tracy. Planning is a critical aspect of any project or endeavor inside your company. It’s a multi-level thinking exercise that helps you organize your thoughts, resources, and actions to achieve your desired outcomes. There are many tools available in the market which offer a simple user-friendly interface to do effective planning for your product and company. You could consider using: ProductBoard, ClickUps, Monday.com, Pendo.io which allows you to break down product features into small executable tasks, define priorities, dependencies etc. This also drives visibility for leadership, transparency among stakeholders and can significantly increase productivity for the team that may be spread across geographies.
• Effective Communication: Statistically, businesses with effective communication strategies are 3.5 times more likely to yield better results. Communication is not just what you say, it’s also how you say it. Communicating the right things at the right time to the right person is what matters in your startup. This is even more relevant for remote teams where things are fluid and velocity is critical for success. Effective communication also yields some intangible benefits such as it often correlates with a motivated workforce.
• Accelerate Buy-In: 97% of employees believe lack of cross-functional team alignment impacts the outcome of a task or project. Buy-in without any formal process can be a tricky beast to handle while also being time consuming and creates churn for the team. However, it’s a necessary evil when it comes to running a modern startup with multiple cross-functional stakeholders. Hence program management can help by putting together standard frameworks to accelerate buy-ins. I recommend using technology to provide offline context. For example, consider using Fireflies.ai which can help your team record, transcribe, search, and analyze voice conversations. You could also ensure that there is a clear definition for OKRs to articulate/align the team goals and hold each contributor accountable for delivering the outcomes.?

I hope you find these tips helpful. If you would like to chat more about Program Management best practices and/or to get advice tailored to your business needs, feel free to book a preliminary free session with me using the link below.

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