• planning is not regarded as progress, and management often instinctively, feel very uncomfortable when progress is not visible (and resources are, perhaps, idle)
• there is a perception that the things that will go wrong will be able to be fixed as they occur, without too much delay and expense
• everyone loves a hero; project managers who miraculously save the day despite the odds are lauded as heroes. (Indiana Jones movies where nothing ever went wrong would be short and lack excitement, wouldn’t they?)
• this project is very similar to those that we’ve run in the past, so how hard can it be?

So how much planning would be the ‘right’ amount?

Well that all depends. On:

1. The severity of impacts that may occur. If people might be injured or die, then not taking planning seriously will definitely be culpable. If, on the other hand, the worst that can happen is that we may need to nip out to get a bottle of milk, then lots of planning will probably be time and effort wasted.
2. The degree of uncertainty that surrounds the project. Our choices in the face of uncertainty are research, purchase of information, or make assumptions (which will require review at regular intervals). The nature of the uncertainty (e.g. scale of solution, detailed requirements) is likely to inform your response. What’s important is to recognise that there are times when decisions need to be made despite there being insufficient information to decide with certainty.
3. The degree of risk that surrounds the project. This is one of the primary drivers for the adoption of project management approaches. What we know inside out and back-to-front is business-as-usual. As it becomes less understood, the comfort blanket of a project management wrapper becomes more attractive; it’s a risk management vehicle, and taking a considered view of the things that might go wrong may help to avoid some of the pitfalls. More importantly, planning, may make the stakeholders consider that the reward doesn’t justify the risks, and that a more reliable (but expensive) approach is preferable. Don’t imagine that there’s an ‘official’ level of risk that’s acceptable. If your project falls into the ‘if we can’t do it by date X don’t bother’ category, the business is more likely to accept risk than if it’s of the ‘failure here will get us on the front pages of the newspapers’ variety.

If your organisation expects detailed and well-thought-through plans, then the only danger in undertaking a ‘no brainer’ project is that it’ll take a bit longer and cost a bit more than necessary. If, on the other hand, you are used to running projects which have many common features, and your latest project assignment is very different from the norm, you need to be much more wary as the downside is a project debacle.

Capacity without appropriate capability often leads to poor performance – 100% effort, but real achievement stuck at 50%.

Given these two less than perfect solutions, which is the better approach? In the past organisations have tended to give priority to one or the other – thereby guaranteeing sub-optimal performance. More successful companies have addressed this false dichotomy – it is possible to have the right capability and the right capacity – it’s just that a one-size-fits-all solution simply will not work.

Capability and capacity issues were among the principal drivers for the surge of outsourcing seen in the ‘90s. Appealing, but (as it turned out) not compelling, arguments were made about the ability of large groups of specialists to form self-enhancing communities of practice to drive up capability. Meanwhile, the statistics of large numbers would take care of the peaks and troughs of demand – thus satisfying the capacity problem.

A related concern is that the ‘leaching’ of intellectual property (IP; that increasingly highly valued commodity – which must include the knowledge held by internal resource) has proved very hard to limit, with the associated reduction in distinction between, and specific value proposition of, competitor companies.

A further linked trend was the introduction of ‘contractorisation’; reducing permanent headcount and replacing with, usually long-term, contractors. The implied flexibility, the matching of capacity with demand, and indeed the selection of the appropriate skills without the costs of training has proved largely illusory. While attractive in terms of matching numbers to demand, it has turned out not to resolve the challenges of capability or capacity.

Once again the loss of IP – or rather the failure to retain IP – has become a very serious issue. The problem is so serious that some organisations have begun a concerted effort to ‘decontractorise’, which means exactly what it says – with long term contractors being faced with stark choices of ‘join (and accept the salary reduction) or leave’! But there are other issues, not least of which are the difficulty in the performance management of contractors and the level of personal development investment made by contractors is often lower than that carried out by organisations.

So what does work? What are successful organisations doing?

They are addressing the capability problem by staged and structured investment in their staff, especially those identified as ‘key’, because they are, or will be, owners of essential IP. ‘Will’, because rather than hiring only experienced, trained, (and so skilled) individuals, successful organisations are placing 30% of investment in developing people. Their capacity problem, however, is being dealt with in rather more interesting ways. Firstly by hiring – usually through managed-service providers – and secondly by managing the demand.

This second approach is particularly apparent in well-run project-based organisations. The financial pressure over the past few years has challenged the way investment is made in projects with the result that enterprise-wide project portfolio management has become a valued activity. By applying the principles derived from financial portfolio management and concepts of value in a more rigorous way, the demand for projects is being addressed, and with it, capacity.

The questions their Boards are addressing today are not just about the desirability, but also the do-ability of change, and that is defined in terms of capacity and capability, no longer just in terms of pounds and pence.

The most effective solution is as it always was – a blend.

Contractor skills and expertise and internal development can usefully be brought together. For larger organisations this blend is formed through the development of professions or academies or by simply establishing communities of professionals who share a common goal.

But in each it is clear that the most successful form of capability development isn’t about providing training courses. It has been proven that a blend of knowledge transfer (often via courses and e-learning) for the less experienced, followed by ‘application-based’ learning to enhance and broaden expertise and experience, is the most effective approach.

It is the latter of these approaches that is becoming increasingly valued and valuable within organisations. It also provides an ideal opportunity to gain increased value from contractor resources through ‘live’ knowledge and skills transfers – acting as expert coaches and providing support to the community.

So what are the critical steps towards a successful solution?

1. Establish what exactly are the core competences of your organisation
2. Invest in those people possessing the core competences: and own them
3. Don’t outsource the management of core capabilities: grow it
4. Introduce performance management against published criteria for contract staff and involve those responsible for its implementation
5. Be ruthless in the selection and culling of ‘projects’: use public and published criteria in the management and control of project portfolios
   and
6. Make the best possible use of your contractors in order to enhance your internal capability!

Change, though a fundamental human condition and essential for a healthy business, frequently meets resistance and negativity, leading to worsened working patterns and poorer performance and productivity. To achieve planned change, change that delivers the benefits and vision that drove the change, takes experienced change practitioners and leaders to maintain morale and ensure the changes are adopted and embedded.

So what happens when there is no apparent end to change? What happens when an organisation, for whatever reason, seems committed to undergo continual change?

Change fatigue! Change fatigue sucks energy out of people and the change system. It is worse than resistance, which can be turned and its energy used to drive things forward. Change fatigue makes people passive – nothing gets done, there is easy agreement but no commitment, with lethargy and tokenism that mean processes and behaviours remain unaltered, and no benefits realised.

So what does work? Big change or small change; big bang or structured change; brutal or soft? Any of these might work; but NEVER slow, drawn-out change. If you need an operation, there are many procedures that could be used, but you would never chose one that favoured “operate over the period of a week” approach… Change needs to be planned and communicated, with clear milestones which can be recognised and celebrated, if appropriate, and it needs an end.

Nor should it be delayed until the last possible moment. Waiting until the project is about to deliver, just won’t do – it is far too late. Tackling the change issues early is not only sensible, it is often the only way the issues can be properly addressed. This may mean starting as early as when decisions are being made during project portfolio prioritisation. Far from resource availability being the only deciding factor – so often the approach adopted in less mature organisations – it is the assessment and modelling of the impacts of the changes on the business wrought by the projects that are equally critical. With this as a clear governance accountability, the incidence of change fatigue drops.
But what approach should be taken?

Portfolio optimisation

First must be an evaluation of the value the change has for the business and the achievement of its strategy. This establishes the desirability of any project which then must be moderated by, firstly, the level of risk of not achieving the benefits, and only then by considering the impact and riskiness of resourcing the project – establishing its do-ability.

The real difficulty arises when ‘new’ decisions have to be taken in the context of all those made earlier about the project portfolio and allocation of resources to other projects and business-as-usual tasks. The likelihood of making a good decision on including a new project (in the overall change portfolio) that ravels earlier good decisions taken on other projects is very high. So how can this be addressed?

To make ‘safe’ decisions governance groups must look beyond simple ‘case-by-case’ assessments and look to apply organisation-wide capacity modelling tools and techniques. Such tools should provide a degree of ‘what if’ scenario planning. The major factors to be considered are:

• impact modelling: indicating the type, level of risk and timing of anticipated change mapped against the business areas receiving the changes from projects and other initiatives – whilst maintaining business as usual performance
• project modelling: indicating the optimal mix of projects: size, type and complexity, that the organisation can effectively manage at any one time to achieve the desired benefits
• resource modelling: indicating optimal combination of resources required to manage the agreed levels of project work.

Impact modelling is particularly helpful in sequencing and sizing change and is essential in dynamic businesses where significant change, and hence change fatigue, are common.

One approach that has paid big dividends to organisations with project portfolios with more than 20 projects is in the ‘efficient frontier’ modelling tool. It uses the concepts of risk-adjusted value and risk-adjusted project costs to identify the 5-10 genuine options for the most desirable and do-able portfolio.

Impact modelling

It determines the best combinations in terms of return (both financial and strategic) from the initiative investment. To select the best possible portfolio, the governance group can then focus its attention on a small number of feasible portfolios (highlighted red boxes in the diagram). The real gain from this tool, and others like it, is most obvious when additional requests for projects arise after the portfolio has been agreed – a common, almost inevitable event that disturbs the best laid plans.

Change is an everyday reality for most businesses, and ‘change on change’ is becoming more frequent as the rate of change increases inexorably – but the human psyche has its limits, which must be understood and respected if the changes are to deliver the benefits that were the driver of the change.

CITI has worked in the field of making projects and programmes valuable for more than 20 years. If you would like to know more about any of these modelling techniques to enhance the likelihood of successful change in your organisation please call or write to Jane, who will be delighted to provide more information.

1. The only thing a project leaves behind; projects are by definition temporary entities. The team will disband, the sponsor and project manager move on and the project itself will be nothing more than a file-note in the PMO library. The legacy is the tangible output that the project generated; its product set
2. Easier to manage than tasks; it is often not possible to tell the real status of a task, even with the most honest and diligent reporting. By looking at the extent of the completeness of a product (because of its physical nature) it is far easier and quicker to get an accurate view of progress
3. The power of visualisation; a joint understanding of theoretical concepts can be difficult to achieve; this is why people use analogies all the time. Products are very much easier to visualize – to see in your ‘mind’s eye’ – than activities, allowing people to reach and share a joint understanding much more quickly
4. Perfect source for milestones; why place a milestone at the end of an activity? If the output of the process is unsatisfactory then you will have to repeat the activity, so it hasn’t really finished and the milestone hasn’t been met. Base the milestone, instead, on the output….otherwise known as the product!
5. Easy to decompose; once the primary level product has been decided upon it is a relatively simple process to establish the sub-products. A house has foundations, walls and a roof; walls have vertical surfaces, windows and doors and so on. This ability to quickly decompose a product allows the selection of appropriate management points and highlights areas of particular risk very early in the project.
6. Tangible and therefore easy to monitor; because a product has, in all instances, a physical presence it is easy to establish if it is present or not. And, if a product is too big, late in the lifecycle or inappropriate as a monitoring point, you can simply select a product or combination of products at a level or two lower in the decomposition.
7. Unarguable evidence of progress; giving you the ability to demonstrate to your client (and your suppliers to you) what has been achieved so far for the time and money expended.
8. The answer to the client’s requirements; and therefore good for stakeholder engagement, management and expectation setting
9. Necessary to satisfy your critical success factors (CSFs); not only are products the key to benefits, but without appropriate products the CSFs are also unattainable. Remember, if you don’t achieve your CSFs then you have failed. Products allow you to place appropriate focus and emphasis
10. Ease of communication; akin to visualization, being able to clearly describe and itemise the deliverable set facilitates effective communication. It allows a straightforward explanation of what is in and what is out of scope of the project – because the product set is the scope.
11. The scope of the project; is often a problem because people interpret it in different ways. The user sees scope as the functionality that they need and have articulated in the requirements; the supplier, conversely, will see the scope as the work (activities) that they will have to undertake. The point at which these two unite is in the products – this is why they exactly define the scope
12. Highlight risks; as soon as people start to visualise or understand the level of complexity inherent in the products or their dependencies they start to understand the risks. At its simplest this may simply be a question of looking at a product definition and thinking “we’ve never done one of these before, I bet it’s tricky!” At a more sophisticated level the way in which the product breakdown structure is populated will tell you plenty about risk.
13. Clarifies dependencies; product flow diagrams (clearly impossible without an appreciation of the product set) give the earliest indication of the dependencies within and beyond a project. These are vital, later on in the planning process, to understanding the dependency network and critical path – if you can’t infer these, and you don’t fully understand your product flow diagram, you will have little control of your schedule.

Well there’s a ‘baker’s dozen’ of reasons for focusing on products – the key to effective project management. The question is which do you find most important? Please contribute to the debate and let us know your views

Three stand out as significant:

1. Natural boundaries

These boundaries are either natural or theoretical. Family boundaries, for example, are naturally occurring whilst a business division is a logical construct and is natural only in the sense that it seems appropriate as a grouping (for whatever reason).

• Pros – powerful affiliations and a clear sense of identity and ‘ownership’ occur around natural boundaries which can be powerful motivating forces. People will often take huge pride in their company’s brand – an expression of a natural boundary surrounding their organisation – working extremely hard for and becoming fiercely protective of it.
• Cons – they have the potential to be divisive, running the risk of a ‘them and us’ culture. You can see this in many organisations. Once established they can also quickly become entrenched and hard to flex.

2. Political boundaries

Boundaries of this nature are formed on axes of power and do not necessarily relate to natural boundaries; indeed they might cut across them. For example, the sales and production directors of a business might combine forces to overcome the objections of the logistics director to a project they favour. In this instance a political boundary has been established that crosses two natural boundaries.

• Pros – Political boundaries allow interested parties to unite behind a common objective and can therefore be powerful in providing a focus – but the goal has to be clear. They also have a multiplying effect on the individual participants’ power. It is on this basis that such powerful interest groups as Greenpeace and Amnesty International arise.
• Cons – Maintaining alignment and subverting power for personal agendas can be major stumbling blocks for these types of boundary. People can also be inherently suspicious of ‘politicians’ and behave accordingly.

3. Momentum boundaries

These boundaries are created by behaviour. Fashion on the high street or virals on the internet are obvious examples. Once sufficient people view a You Tube clip it builds a momentum of its own as people look at what other people are doing or looking at and allow it to influence their behaviours. The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell provides a very readable explanation of this.

• Pros – Momentum boundaries are probably most useful in gaining adoption of change and can therefore be extremely valuable. It is possibly better to be making progress in some unplanned, or slightly ‘off-track’, direction than not at all since it builds an increased visibility of and appetite for the change. Momentum boundaries can also have the happy result of ‘sweeping past’ objectors to change who get brushed aside the mass behaviour of others.
• Cons – Unpredictability and maintenance of control of the change as it develops its own momentum is the most significant challenge in this direction.

Conclusions; well, you pay your money and you take your choice – all boundaries (there are others that relate to change too) can be helpful or a complete pain. It’s how you approach and manage them that really matters.

There you are then, three boundaries and now, four questions: What has your experience been? Which are the most useful or powerful boundaries in your organisation? How have you used these and other boundaries to assist change? Which boundaries do you find yourself exploiting or walking into?

One thing that is now recognised is that for a transformation to be successful it cannot be imposed on individuals – they must want to change. An excellent way of doing this is to empower them – let individuals and groups have a say in the way that the transformed organisation will work. I’m guessing that some managers will be nervously shuffling their feet at this point; others may be high-fiving.

Leaders who favour a command-and-control approach could be considering that the judicious use of employee surveys should be appropriate to demonstrate inclusion. Others, hooked on emotional intelligence and later concepts, may prefer a laissez-faire approach in which we adopt an emerging strategy for the change. Neither of these will work on its own, because both approaches have relevance in successful change. Herrero talks of Viral Change™ and uses words that include contagion and epidemic as characteristics in transforming organisations. However, for this to work, he identifies that rules must be in place within which individuals and groups can operate to implement the change.

This brings me back to anarchy, which Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher, described as ‘law and freedom without force’. My interpretation on this is that the laws are the rules and boundaries set down by an organisation’s senior managers within which implementing the transformation can operate. The freedom is the ability for those working in the organisation to make the change to themselves a reality so that it will stick; the contagion.

Who are the leaders in this change? Well most of them are people like me, and you – ordinary workers in the organisation that others are willing to mimic or follow; those who know what will work and what will not and can lead by example; those others trust. That sounds truly anarchic to me. What’s your view?

It was clear that the vision had remained within the senior management team, with little engagement from middle management or from the large group of knowledge workers that made up the staff. This lack of engagement was because of the highly directive style of leadership, that, while powerful in normal operational environments, was proving ineffective in transformational change.

A series of forums were created and participation encouraged – which was grudging and suspicious at first, but when it was accepted that the leadership was in earnest and had changed behaviours, became enthusiastic. By dissolving, and in some special cases creating, both real and imaginary boundaries, of power, process and politics, the company began to benefit from the impact of many minds working on the same problem within a shared vision. Sales leapt in response and the programme – re-invigorated – delivered to its vision.

However, in performing migration of customer data to the new system, it was felt appropriate to use the Royal Mail’s postcode software to verify addresses and to render them into preferred formats. When the project’s scheduled three months for data migration had elapsed, but with no end in sight, management insisted that validation activities ceased in order that the primary beneficial impact – knowing which customers were on which systems – could be achieved.

However, this hadn’t become clear until the design of the change programme structure. Mapping the vision to the blueprint threw up an amazing volume and variety of operational change within the stores. It was suspected that this would prove overwhelming. Further modelling showed detailed mapping of hot-spots (areas that would be swamped by change). The hot-spots tended to occur where several initiatives were delivering numerous changes into an area simultaneously, some of which would be national changes but others local to the specific stores or regions. The picture was ugly and complex.

Prioritisation was the first solution: identifying what really needed to happen in which sequence. This was followed by a series of simple procedures and protocols that protected the vulnerable workers in hot¬-spots from change fatigue. The important part was to understand the implications of this protection across all the initiatives on their rate of progress and the related organisational change.

Almost counter-intuitively, the effect of regulating change in the hot-spots was a rapid acceleration in the overall rate of change across the organisation. The primary reason for this was that change fatigue wasn’t encountered. Additionally, the more regulated the change that was introduced, the greater the rate of adoption became.

Initial research into the cause of the problem was focused on requirements management and stability (a common cause of slippage and delivery failure in many organisations). However, this demonstrated that this client was definitely no worse and possibly rather better than many. Deeper research revealed a corporate policy of planning the utilisation of the delivery community at 115% (the underpinning assumption being that, for the higher value work, it would be worth paying the premium cost of overtime to achieve delivery). The consequence was that at this, unattainable, level of loading the planned portfolio was slipping because the organisation was unable to do anything to improve on normal levels of productivity which rarely exceed 80%. The situation was compounded by the ‘surprise’ arrival of additional initiatives; mandatory and ‘emergency’ projects being the most common. The consequence of these ‘surprises’ was constant portfolio re-prioritisation.

Part of the solution was the implementation of a portfolio management and prioritisation tool (CITI’s portfolio efficient frontier analysis [PEFA] tool) which focused attention on the really strategically important portfolio content. This was combined with a formal policy on resource utilisation and a cap on the size of the portfolio. Within a year the organisation had control of a stable portfolio, reliably achieving strategic aims with the capacity to deal with the ‘curve balls’ that inevitably get thrown into the mix.