The Key to a Successful Project

07/09/2017

I recently attended a presentation from project futurist and guru Colin D Ellis. Colin is an exceptional presenter and engages the audience with his energetic style of speaking. This is a good thing as he’s not exactly speaking about the most interesting topic in the world – why projects keep failing.

It seems projects fail at an alarming rate – only 29% are reported as successful according to the Standish Group’s 2015 Chaos Report. Now whether you believe the accuracy of this number or not, it’s quite a concern if project success rates are anywhere close to 29%.

According to Colin, at its core there are only two reasons for project failure. Poor project sponsorship and poor project management. Colin has authored two books on the subject The Conscious Project Leader and the recently released The Project Rots From The Head.

Colin believes there needs to be investment and significant change in behaviour of project sponsors and project leaders to improve project success rate. I’d say I have to agree. Similar to Cybersecurity being seen as a just a technical issue for the operations team, most directors and senior executives don’t seem to understand that projects start and end with them.

Sponsors need to be invested in the project, not just their “pet project”, every project! This helps to ensure the project has every chance of success. From my experience and obviously Colin’s, project sponsors appear to pay only lip service to projects, there could be a number of reasons for this. These include not fully understanding what being a project sponsor means or how to carry out the tasks, maybe its lack of time or lack of interest. Whatever the reasons, everything cannot be left to the project manager.

Project sponsors need to lead by example and build the team and culture needed for success. In his latest book Colin provides detailed guidance on how to be a successful project sponsor, I recommend this as a must read for those in governance roles.

A key takeaway for me was that culture is a critical component of a successful project. Sponsors need to take the time to provide an environment where people can and want to succeed by kicking projects off with establishing a vision, agreeing behaviours, discuss project risks / potential solutions and talking about how the team will work together.

We’d be keen to hear your view on the state of project governance and your success / challenges with delivering successful projects.

Written by Dean Wood