Organisations can turn strategy into action by using project management. Despite the increased investment in project management capabilities, many projects fail to achieve their goals.
This is the second article in a series. We examine how massaging a plan can cause constant misalignment. One of the “seven deadly sins”, originally coined by Jeffrey Pinto in the paper “Lies, damned, and project plans”: Recurring human mistakes that can ruin project planning.
Skarbek is known for jumping into critical situations, where clients’ key projects are in danger and the blame game has begun.
Is there any malpractice in project management or are there environmental factors that led to failure such as lack of commitment, sponsorship, engagement, and/or funding?
Pinto’s seven deadly Sins offer some insight for project managers who are quick to point out that their projects were well managed, but that external factors conspired against them. These insights can make it question whether the profession really got it right.
How often are detailed plans that have been developed by project teams in your organization challenged by senior leaders? What is their specialist knowledge that allows them to reduce the timeline?
Is it their expertise, more technical knowledge than the project team or simply the fact that they have already committed to delivering the project by a specific date? Pinto suggests three possible implications for this behavior:
The project manager knows more about the senior leader than the project manager.
The plan is not trusted by the senior leader
The project manager deliberately hid slack in his plan
It is a disheartening professional experience to see this happen at our clients.
Our expertise in training project teams in integrated plan has been paid for by the client. This involves skilled cross-functional facilitation to ensure that all expertise is incorporated as well as multiple estimation techniques to accurately bracket time.
When project managers give in to pressure and adjust the launch date to suit their needs, the high-quality work is lost and the organisation has to deal with corrupted data, which can cause more damage than professional pride.
If this happens often, we may see project teams adding their own time buffers to protect themselves against the inevitable request for shortcuts. Senior leaders’ behavior is also reinforced when they feel justified in their belief in buffers being regularly hidden in the plans.
If objective timeplanning is compromised on both sides, the entire portfolio of project plans will be untrustworthy and the value delivery for the organisation will be less predictable.
We have found that this will signal a shift in perception to most projects being viewed as ‘late’ even if they are delivered according to the pre-massaged timeline. This is logically the most likely outcome if the initial planning was done well.
It is important to consider the nature of the conversation and the human dynamics.
Our integrated approach to planning is a synthesis from military mission command estimation process as well as classic brainstorming, design thinking, and we often see human dynamics at work in our integrated approach.
Senior leader who demands a shorter regulatory timeline without proper examination of feasibility and does not listen to constraints
The subject matter expert who has the technical expertise and past experience to defend a firmly held opinion about timings without engaging in creative problem solving
Junior team members who see something that others don’t are ignored
Extroverts are unable to inquire from more introverted members about their valuable inputs.
Planning i
