The five ingredients of a successful initiative

by Steve Deist

Got a lot on your plate? Most businesses suffer no shortage of great-sounding initiatives and ideas for improvement. There are always new technologies to be implemented, business processes to be streamlined and operations to be restructured. All these great ideas are, of course, useless until you act on them.

Unfortunately the action part is where the train usually leaves the rails. Fuzzy goals, shifting priorities, limited resources and poor follow-through can spoil the show regardless of how compelling the vision. The difference between great companies and poor ones rests not in their good intentions but in how well they execute change.

In short, you need good, old-fashioned project management to get payback on your initiative dollars. The good news is that effective project management is actually very simple. The bad news is that it is usually not easy. The types of initiatives found in the real world of business seldom require sophisticated techniques, but most companies fail to get the basics right. In my entire consulting career, I have never seen a project fail if it had all five of these ingredients.

Define scope clearly
Of course you need to study your problems to devise effective solutions. Once a course of action is determined, however, it's time to stop the analysis, map realistic "waypoints" and get started. Waypoints are simply fixed points in the schedule at which you evaluate actual results obtained and re-plan the next portion or phase of the project.

We've seen far too many companies who make one of these mistakes in defining the scope of their projects.

• Mistaking confusion for flexibility. Planning and execution should be two separate activities. The right way to enjoy the benefits of mid-course correction is to set clear waypoints in your initiative. Until you reach those waypoints, your project team should keep their heads down and march relentlessly toward their milestones. Constant navel-gazing and re-evaluation before actual results have been examined will paralyze your project.

• Including fuzzy long-term goals. If your project's objective can't be clearly summarized in a few sentences and its success measured objectively, you need to clarify (and probably reduce) the scope. Again, many companies intermingle analysis and design with execution. Look at the following table to see examples of clear, actionable objectives vs. fuzzy objectives.

Assign the right team
Once the scope has been defined, the next most critical task is to assign the right people for the project team. Here are some guidelines.

• Assign the people you need, not the people who are available. Typically, your top performers are swamped with work and their managers refuse to let them serve on the project team. Of course, it is precisely these people who, having the expertise and the knowledge of how things really work, are most needed for the initiative. If you make the decision to keep the best people off of the project, you are jeopardizing its success and sending a strong signal that business as usual is more important than the initiative for change.

• Use cross-functional teams only where needed. Some projects involve only a single area of your business. For these, stick with team members from the affected department rather than trying to build team spirit or facilitate knowledge transfer with a cross-functional team. If included on the project team, those outside of the affected department will feel unproductive and resented. If the project crosses functional boundaries, by all means, balance the team with representatives from all affected departments.

• Use outside resources intelligently but sparingly. Almost by definition, an initiative for change involves things that your company has never done before. It's usually more cost effective to engage consultants or hire experienced new staff than to learn on the fly. However, if you use consultants, make sure that they spend their time teaching and mentoring your staff rather than performing the work themselves. It may be tempting to outsource the entire project, but with a few exceptions like a massive layoff, you will need internal ownership to be successful.

Emphasize team communication
It sounds incredibly simple, but in most projects the team members are not clear about what they're doing and why they're doing it. Unclear objectives usually contribute to this confusion (see above), but poor communication plays a large role as well. 

There is simply no substitute for regular, frequent team meetings or conferences. The project objectives and status cannot be repeated too often. If you are currently implementing an initiative, try asking each member of the project team to write down the objectives, target completion date and an estimate of the percentage complete. You may be surprised by the variety of answers you get.

Track progress objectively
Most projects are tracked very subjectively. Team members inevitably estimate their tasks as being 90-percent done and they seem to remain at this level of completion for weeks. Generally, initiatives must be planned down to a fairly granular level to track progress accurately and avoid surprises.

One definition of project management is: translating a general objective into a set of discrete tasks. After you have a clear objective you must define a set of steps to reach it. For more complicated projects (more than 50 tasks with cross dependencies between them), these steps are typically documented in a "workplan" or "timeline" using project management software. For simpler projects, a basic spreadsheet or list of component tasks is sufficient.

Regardless of the tool used, the following techniques will ensure that you are able to gauge your progress:

• Keep tasks small and discrete. Each task in a plan should involve between four and 24 man-hours of work. If the tasks are smaller, you are micro-managing and writing an instruction manual rather than a project plan. If they are larger, you should try to break them into smaller steps. Being able to plan at this level of detail proves that you are exactly clear about how to achieve your objectives.

• Assign a clear deliverable to each task. As much as possible, assign a deliverable for each task so that completion is absolute and obvious. For example, rather than naming a task "consult with Mary," call it "Mary signs off checklist." This forces you to get very clear about what you want from Mary (because you need to create a checklist) and also ensures that task completion is obvious (you either have a signature or you don't).

• Make tasks all or nothing. Don't allow your team to assign intermediate completion percentages to individual tasks. Instead, leave each task 0 percent complete until its deliverable has been provided, at which time it goes to 100 percent. If you determine your overall progress by summing up many individual tasks (75 of 100 tasks are completed) it will be much more accurate than a subjective measure of a few tasks (each of our four items is about 75 percent done). This technique also forces the team member to focus on fully completing a few things at a time.

Don't ignore the project management function
Don't assume that a good daily business manager will be a good project manager. They require different skills and temperaments. Many successful companies develop an internal project management staff, sometimes called the company SWAT team or corporate commandos, to receive project management training.

The activities of monitoring task completion, tracking and forecasting progress and conducting status meetings are essential but often downplayed or disregarded. To some extent they represent administrative overhead, but you're asking for trouble if you ignore them. I've often found that the simple act of creating a status report forces clear thinking among the project team. This has value even if the report is never presented.

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