Filling Execution Gaps

How Executives and Project Managers Turn Corporate Strategy into Successful Projects

Todd C. Williams

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781501506345
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Desarrollo empresarial

"I expected good, but this is great." -Janet Pirus Phelps, Principle, Strategic CFO, Former CFO Papa Murphy's Pizza

Gaps are holes in your organization where tasks fall and failure breeds. They inhibit your ability to implement strategic plans, lead people, and run successful projects. Daily, executives, middle managers, and project managers wrestle with "the big six":

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• Absence of common understanding

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• Disengaged executive sponsors

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• Misalignment with goals

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• Poor change management

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• Ineffective governance

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• Lackluster leadership

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Ignoring any of these gaps endangers any strategy or project. They regularly destroy hundreds of companies' ability to turn their corporate vision into business value—taking careers with them.

Filling Execution Gaps addresses the sources of these gaps, and how to fill them. Without any one of these important functions, projects fail. Without change management, adoption suffers. Without common understanding, there is confusion. Without goals, business units, and capabilities aligned, execution falters. Without executive sponsorship, decisions languish. Too little governance allows bad things to happen, while too much governance creates overburdening bureaucracy. Without leadership at all levels of the organization, people are directionless.

Using decades of experience, years of research, and interviews with hundreds of business leaders, author of the Amazon #1 Best Seller in Business Project Management, Rescue the Problem Project, Todd Williams illustrates how to fill these gaps, meet corporate goals, and increase value.

An excellent review of this book appears here:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/improving-project-execution-filling-gaps-murray-pmp-ms

Click below to read an interview with the author:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/filling-organization-gaps-successful-project-part-1-naomi/

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/filling-organization-gaps-successful-project-part-2-naomi/?published=t

Facebook users can access an interview on "Project Management Cafe" here:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/projectmanagementcafe/permalink/1975750702698459/

Related blogs can be accessed here:

https://www.projectmanager.com/blog/project-execution

https://www.strategyex.co.uk/blog/pmoperspectives/strategy-from-the-bottom-up/

Check out his August 27, 2018 interview here:

https://www.yegor256.com/shift-m/2018/34.html

Click here for articles by the author on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/we-all-lead-todd-williams/

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/your-inner-leader-task-introspection-todd-williams/

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/leadership-actions-art-listening-todd-williams

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/leadership-actions-getting-people-talk-todd-williams/

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/eliminating-blame-todd-williams/

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/leadership-actions-dialog-discussion-todd-williams/

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/projects-fail-when-people-dont-know-where-going-todd-williams

GAP 1:
Common Understanding

Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.

—Japanese proverb

Chapter 1
Understanding the Problem

Houston, we have a problem.

—Jim Lovell

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.

—Groucho Marx

A problem well put is half solved.

—John Dewey

A group of distracted senior executives sits around the boardroom table while fidgeting with their iPads® and cell phones as the project manager and a few of her core team members come into the room for their project’s bimonthly executive review meeting. As she looks around the room she sees the same blank faces she has seen for the past few bimonthly reviews. Some have a stake in the project while others are there because the CEO required their attendance. Her team has spent the better part of a week preparing for the presentation based on the project management office’s (PMO) required list of reports and graphs. They show hundreds of tasks being completed and a few dozen falling behind schedule. She presents tables highlighting the relentless stream of customer change orders and the growing risk register. At times, her team members speak up to highlight specific items. She adds as much excitement as possible to describe how earned value is increasing; the estimate-at-completion has increased only slightly. The customer is anxious, wondering if the operations team really understands the extent of the changes. She closes her ten-minute presentation providing numerous caveats on a few predictions.

Expressionless, the CFO glares, analyzing the charts, and delivers a gut punch to the project manager:

“I have three questions: What is our revenue recognition to date, will we deliver the project before we have to announce the quarterly earnings, and are we maintaining our margin?”

The CEO quickly adds that she is concerned how these changes are affecting the initiative’s goals, as key functionality has been replaced and may not be transferrable to other clients. With interest rates increasing and sales in this sector weakening, she delivers the next punch:

“Is the ROI still valid?”

The project manager looks back with a blank stare, her stomach feeling like a lead ball. She has no idea about the margin, nor about sales forecasts, nor when earnings forecasts are due, let alone the federal rules around revenue recognition. The project was already justified and the customer is not going to pay if the promised changes are not made. In fact, the CEO signed off on the changes two months ago, some of them against the project manager’s advice. She looks for her executive sponsor, but, as usual, he is not in the meeting. The PMO manager nods her head seeming to approve the questions while offering no assistance. Both the CFO and the CEO are annoyed that they must wait for answers and start talking about the project in third person. The CEO looks to the PMO manager and says, “These are standard questions all project managers should be able to answer. Let’s get Steve in here to straighten this out.” The PMO manager takes a few notes. The project manager and her team are dismissed. From the executive’s perspective, the wrong data were presented.

There is another perspective. Nothing strikes more fear into a project manager’s heart than hearing:

“I am from management. I am here to help.”

This short statement and its reaction highlight a number of issues in today’s business. The project manager’s impression of managers, leadership, and executives is that they are out of touch with the project and the customer, do not understand project management, have only their own interests in mind, and do nothing but get in the way. In actuality, the help does not get the project closer to delivery. It adds layers of governance in the form of reports and spreadsheets, extra meetings, further uncertainty, and new work. The project manager already is faced with late tasks, too few resources, and an unhappy customer; management’s “help” only adds more work.

Examining management’s welcoming line closely, there is an implied confession. The executives are admitting they were not “here” to begin with. They were too far from the project to see the issues arise or to hear the requests for assistance from the project team. They are admitting there has been a gap between them and the project.

There is a third perspective—end users. In a recent demonstration of the prototype, the end user was frustrated by the functionality. People do not want to use the product because it is too complex and slows their work. These poor folks just want a solution to a problem. Maybe it is a building expansion to increase manufacturing capabilities, but the truss supports make effective equipment layout difficult; it could be a new road to ease traffic congestion, but the access ramps are too narrow; it could be a modification to a piece of software that requires twice the amount of data; or it is a “better” procedure to buy raw material that requires three competitive bids on all purchases in an attempt to decrease material costs, but slows procurement to a crawl. End users have a need to be addressed. They expect some level of value from the solution. Unfortunately, end users are rarely experts at creating what they need; they are experts in using it. Their measure of success is value and their most common constraint is cost. In most cases these two items, value and budget, are in tension. The value they want is outside their budget. The result is ongoing compromise and change. People on all sides of a project need education and, as the end user gains knowledge, their needs change even more. In this process, they become more annoyed with the project manager’s spreadsheets as the value they desire is subjective and cannot be shown mathematically.

These simple scenarios play out hundreds of times a day and are just three common examples of how we experience gaps between strategy and execution. Projects lose their alignment with corporate goals because targets change to meet the ever-changing business environment, goals are not understood or disseminated to begin with, project scope changes to meet customer requests, or, more likely, some combination of these and other factors. More governance is applied to ensure gaps between goals and project deliverables do not occur again. The result is that the customer, client, or end user rejects the deliverable as unusable.1

Instead of closing gaps, these actions expand them as the new layers remove the project farther from the executives. They hobble the entire organization; slowing its ability to respond. There are no accountable executives ensuring the corporate goals are met and that the customer is happy. Governance creates irrelevant reporting requirements and no one is handling change management. People are headed for different goals and talking different languages. Leadership breaks down.

Linear Thinking Causes the Problem

The scenarios above provide three possible perspectives—the executive, the project, and the end user. They highlight the gaps in how our businesses, non-profits, and government organizations track strategy execution and project alignment. They also show how perspective hinders our understanding. Experience shows that organizations from every business domain—regardless of size, domain, or home continent; whether government or non-profit; privately or publicly owned—have these same scenarios play out with roughly the same consequences. They lose both effectiveness and efficiency. As a result, customers get frustrated and look for new suppliers. At times, these gaps—common understanding, alignment, sponsorship, adoption, effective governance, and leadership—become chasms and a crisis ensues. When the problem reaches a fever pitch, action happens. This is too little, too late, and usually produces incomplete results. The solution is too narrowly focused, due to delivery constraints, and it applies to a specific situation dealing with just that one project. People looking at symptoms on a single project or initiative miss the common threads that run through numerous projects, especially if they run across lateral business silos. Root causes are rarely addressed because we want to find the “one thing” to solve the problem. The more general solution, that would fix this and future projects, is overlooked. It takes far more work to completely investigate a systemic solution than time and budgets allow. Hence, the problems resurface in slightly different forms and rarely point to common root issues. Angry customers, more bureaucracy, finger pointing, missed goals, loss of direction, confusion, general frustration, and outright failure (see Case Study: What’s in a Name?) are common outcomes.

Six gaps in today’s businesses can plague projects. These six gaps all need to be attended to. By addressing just one, little improvement is seen. These six gaps are:

–Common understanding of problems and direction (Chapter 1).

–Alignment between corporate goals and projects (Chapter 2).

–Effective executive sponsorship (Chapters 3 and 4).

–Adoption and organization change management (Chapters 5 and 6).

–Right sized governance—not too heavy and not too light (Chapters 7 and 8).

–Leadership distributed throughout the project execution stack (Chapters 9, 10 and 11).

The idea that multiple issues are at the source of most of our project problems (not to mention corporate ones) comes from experience. After fixing, auditing, or researching dozens of troubled projects, I have found that none had the simple solution of fixing just one problem. Trivial issues were solved long before I arrived. Real failures have three to five core issues to solve (see Case Study: Affordable Care Act Marketplace Failure—Cover Oregon). Executives always request I identify and fix “the problem” and instead I always find multiple problems. Until 2007, my hands were tied to fixing only “the project.” In that year, I proposed something new to a client. I would work on solving its project’s problems, if I could then address the root causes. On a gentleman’s handshake, we proceeded. Sure enough, we found three major contributors. Poor executive representation (poor leadership and sponsorship), lack of a distinct end user (lack of understanding and alignment), and no maintenance group (missing governance) were reasons for the failure. We addressed each by requiring executive sponsors on all projects, ensuring projects were aligned with clearly defined goals and end users, correcting numerous issues in the development environments (affecting all work), and creating a core team dedicated to the product we were modifying (affecting future projects on that product). The symptoms seen on the rescued project never recurred on other projects.

Case Study: What’s in a Name?

As a member of the National Speakers Association (NSA), I attended the organization’s July 2014 annual conference in San Diego. The conference leaders were hyping an exciting closing session that none of us could afford to miss. The final day came and as the 1,200 attendees strolled into the final general session we were handed luggage tags and backup batteries for our cell phones branded for a company called Platform—typical conference tchotchke. The session was highly produced with loud music, Madison Avenue video, and (of course) professional speakers touting how we all came from a wide array of industries ranging from sales to training, from music to comedy, but we all had one thing in common—we deliver our goods from a platform. From then on, the National Speakers Association would be known as Platform! The hall’s first three rows (occupied by the executive team and subcommittees who knew about the name change prior to the conference) jumped to their feet erupting into cheers and whistles. The rest of us sat, wondering how the line “I am a professional member of Platform” was going to help us be understood as professional speakers. Granted, saying we are members of the NSA caused heads to turn (most people thinking we are with the U.S. National Security Agency), but it surely is a good conversation starter. Without a doubt, the current name has many issues. However, the new name had two major problems. First, it did not mean anything to our customers and, second, the brand “Platform” was already used—by Michael Hyatt (an NSA member). Two weeks later the organization’s newly appointed president reversed the decision and we stayed with the name National Speakers Association. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were thrown away.

Were there gaps in this failure? Not being invited to analyze the failure, I can only surmise. But surely the senior executives in the organization were out of touch with its membership (its customer) and did not keep the solution aligned with its custome...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• GAP — 1: Common Understanding
• GAP 2: Alignment between Corporate Goals and Projects
• GAP 3: Engaged Executive Sponsors
• GAP 4: Adoption and Change Management
• GAP 5: Effective Governance
• GAP 6: Project Leadership
• PART 7: Pulling it all Together
• Appendix A: Endnotes
• Index