What Do Most Projects Depend On For Success? and Why Do Most Project Fail?

What do you think the answer is to those questions?  Before I give you the answer I want you to consider 5 questions (reference):

1.      What is your project trying to accomplish?

·        If this is difficult to answer, you’re in trouble.  How can you measure effectiveness and success of a project if you don’t know (and have defined) the expected outcomes?

2.      What are the organizational benefits to this project?

·        Organizational benefits are the high level reasons for implementing the project in the first place. These benefits could include increasing revenue (sales, efficiency, quality), achieving compliance with regulations (ISO standards, OSHA, EPA, etc.) or strengthening employee engagement/customer satisfaction, etc.

3.      What are the specific goals of this project?

·        Specific goals are the outcomes that will result from this project. These are usually SMART outcomes, i.e. specific, measureable, attainable, relevant and timely) that ultimately lead to achievement of the project’s and therefore, organizational benefits. Examples of project objectives are “time needed to assemble widget shortened from 3 hours to 1 hour 10 minutes”, “all frontline employees correctly wear and use provided safety equipment 100% of time”, “customer wait time shortened from 7 minutes to 1 minute” or “all employees logon and enter their duties and processes into the new knowledge management software system”, etc. 

4.      What portion of these benefits depend on Adoption and Usage?

·        All of the projects that I’m involved in with clients have as least a moderate to high level of dependency on adoption and usage by people to meet their objectives.  For example, “increase in percentage of productive time from 60% of the work shift to 75-80%” or “reduce patient wait times in doctor’s clinic” are both highly dependent on the people who need to adopt the new work practices that require them to do their job differently.  That being said, there are some projects have very low dependency on people because the change is a primarily technical in nature; for example, increasing server storage.

5.      What percentage of this benefit will we get “If No One Changes How They Do Their Job”?

·        Asking the “null hypothesis” is always very helpful in order to completely understand how a project’s success hinges on people.  If your project is very technical and relies very little on people, then the percentage of benefit if no one changes how they do their job will easily be 80-100%.  However, if your project is very “people-dependent”, you might get little to no benefit from the project if no one adopts and uses the solutions you provide. 

For example, the operations manager of a hospital central supply department completed a lean/Kaizen project with the objective to reduce the turnaround time for in-house orders from the Surgical Centers from 18 minutes to 6 minutes.  The entire supply area was rearrangement to improve work flow.  Within less than 3 days the entire revamp of the supply area was reversed back to how it was—Why?  Because the people did not like the changes and they weren’t going to do what was asked—period.  Now you may think this is an extreme, worst case example but it’s certainly not the only one I’m aware of.  Think about software implementation—a new ERP system that is dependent on employees using it and inputting information correctly and timely.  If you’ve been a part of software change you know how painful they can be.  For people-dependent projects, you are only likely to achieve a very small portion of benefits and objectives (0%-20%) if no one changes how they do their jobs. 

In the great majority of cases, it’s highly unlikely that no one will change their behavior at all. But by asking “what if no one changes?” you can understand how much your project depends on people and use this to build in tactics and strategies to engaging people in the project and speeding their adoption to the new practices. 

Conclusion

The answer to the questions at the beginning of this article:  PEOPLE!!  Whether you’re working on projects related to improving your organization’s efficiency, safety, quality or customer satisfaction there is one thing that is universal to them all—People!  Take the time to determine in the project development phase how much or how little the project success depends on people.  If it’s more than 20%, be sure to build in resources and solutions for both the technical and people side of the change.  By doing so your success rate will soar.