Tips For Turning Around Troubled Projects

I spent much of the last decade of my consulting career parachuting in and “righting the ship” for Fortune 100 clients whose enterprise transformation efforts had trouble launching, had stalled, or had “left the rails”… Here’s some quick advice for those of you facing your own headwinds on large programs:

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1. You May Not be Popular.? In a world that increasingly wants to be “kind and nice” to everyone, there needs to be people in the room who realize that business decisions need to be made and those decisions, and the people who make them, may NOT be wildly popular!

When I would go in to turn around or jump start an effort I would quickly look for client allies who understood this and had the ear of, or were part of, C-Suite leadership, in order to garner focused and dedicated sponsorship.? Tough decisions on resources, budget, scope, and risk must be made quickly, CANNOT be re-decisioned, and must give the team confidence that serious change is afoot.? Any significant decisions should be made, after analysis, within the first ~30 days, and with firm resolve from leadership that is clear to all team members.

2. Resource Skills are Often Not Enough.? Programs that are underway may be staffed with all the right technical skill-sets, but that doesn’t mean you have the right team in place.? Team culture is critical.? Do team leads collaborate with each other?? Are your experienced leaders and/or consultants comfortable providing options and saying “No”?? Are leaders ok with making unpopular decisions or bringing up risks proactively (see point #1!)?

I would often find consulting and/or software vendor teams who checked all the technical boxes, but who did not mesh well with client counterparts or with the culture of the client.? Team changes, especially at the leadership levels, was often one of the first big decisions that needed to be made.? This goes for both consultant and client personnel.

3. Leadership Requires Trust AND Flexibility.? For those efforts where an organization is spending $50M-$1B, you CANNOT have part-time leadership, either on the consulting or client side of the equation.? Those leaders need to free their schedules and be available for all the new variables which come about on a regular basis.? They also need time to get to know each other, as that trust among leadership is critical to turning around fledging programs.

I would clear my plate of any major sales pursuits or other material delivery programs so I could focus and be available whenever my team or client needed me.? If a client leader called me at 3pm, I needed to be available, not off chasing the next deal.? If the program needed a key decision made, I needed to be able to walk into my counterparts office or get them on the phone within the hour.? A culture of urgency and priority is materially important not only to put a program back on track, but to instill into the program team culture.

I hope you found this helpful.? There’s never a silver bullet to cure everything, but establishing/re-establishing these three key guidelines will point you and your team back to the right path.? Ideally, both consultant and client leadership are on the same page for these efforts.? At times they are not, and in those rare cases, the contract, and often re-writing the contract, becomes critical.? The contractual focused efforts are the least enjoyable turnarounds, but not impossible! ??Good Luck out there!

Brian