Breaking News!! Proactive Project Failure Strikes Again

In it’s ever present sense, well planned projects have the strange ability to fall utterly flat, even after careful evaluation, consideration and the most diligent of planning. But wait! What if that planning phase, wasn’t as diligent as it could have been, what if a saboteur was innocently veiled in the project planning meetings. This saboteur we will call ‘the quite guy in the corner who thought of a really important detail that no one else seemed to notice, because he was secretly an expert at xyz.’. OK to long, by was to afraid to say, hey what about this? For whatever reason, our accidental saboteur decided that the cost of looking like a skeptic and ‘nay sayer’ was personally to risky. Maybe he raised a hand, maybe she made an under the breath comment. Regardless because a culture existed wherein this person was ignored, or not safe in sharing their idea, things went bad. Article #2 for me, is again (surprise) an HBR post on the nuances of premortem vs postmortem analysis or project. How doe we ensure that that we avoid the postmortem, but having a strong enough antithesis conversation and a culture that demands the ‘what ifs’ are explored exhaustively. This pre planned critique, will always be vital when dealing with something so intricate. It really falls on everyone in the room to push the collaborative conversation and to really take ownership of the project/product/task/deliverable/use_your_term_here.

Food for thought? Comments and critique welcome!

Dysfunctional Cross Functionality

I’m a big fan of Harvard Business Review, HBR, when I don’t find myself reading a novel or some business non-fiction that has caught my interest, HBR can really pull at my attention. Nothing better than a 40 minute bus cram session. (reminds me of my undergraduate finals study plan 😛 ) Jokes aside, I’ll start by saying if you dont ever dabble in business reading, these articles are short, sweet, and very well founded, and topically, cover the whole gamut of business topic. And often, as found here, have strong data sets and frame of reference for contextual explanations (mmm, tasty, tasty, context).

This one, in particular grabbed my eye today as we had recently discussed the benefits of cross functional projects in my MGT598 class. In summary, awareness goes up, and the idea is that we’re all more aware of what each person is working on, so everyone does a bit better with their own area of ownership. What the fault in this is, as noted by HBR here, is that sometimes, a company knows something is not working, and holds on to it. They run the well dry, and continue to hope that more water is under the bedrock. These teams continuously failed all over the place, budgets, schedule duration, meeting spec, customer expectations, and alignment with company corproate goals. 75% of 95 teams. These are not at small companies, in actuality they were independently chosen! When we ignore a systemic approach, and flex outside of the drawn lines, we muddle the water. And the more this happens, and the more you ‘change chess pieces’ mid game, the further this more systemic/normative the issue becomes. Digging deep into corporate cultures and team mindset strays to the human element of business furthering the challenge of systemic restructuring.

Strong, direct, and clear executive oversight provides a major uptick to project success capping at 76%, as opposed to light governance and support, yielding about 19% success rate (ouch). It seems to me, to draw a conclusion here, that the nature of the team, and the mentality of/direction given to this team is almost more significant than the project framework itself.

REF: https://hbr.org/2015/06/75-of-cross-functional-teams-are-dysfunctional