Making Projects Work

An article for the PSP Newsletter Feb 05 by John Faulkes

Why is it that so many of our projects take longer than expected, exceed budget and deliver poor outcomes?

It’s becoming increasingly obvious, especially in complex organisations, that one overriding issue consistently sabotages our attempts to work effectively.

What causes problems?
Around any project meeting table are likely to be team members from a wide range of disciplines. A hospital trust may have physicians, nurses, accountants, HR, engineers. These people work in different ways! Often they use different words to mean the same things! They make decisions based on different values and have different constraints.

Over and above all this, they work for large departments that compete with one another for status, resources and power.

There are two ways that this can be addressed. Firstly, with effective Programme Management and secondly by working effectively in project teams.

In this article, we’ve focused on the second issue. We’ll focus on programme Management in a later issue – but do get in touch with us – we’d be happy to share our experiences!

What can we do to make individual projects work effectively?
A solution looked to by many organisations is to train people in project management skills. For aspiring project managers, this is vital. But sending managers from other expert disciplines to these courses, although seemingly a simple solution , may miss the point: we need good processes, systems and tools, but what we need even more is better team behaviours.

A development programme that hit the real issues
A national Museum (The Natural History Museum) recently created an excellent new programme to address this issue. Within the Museum at any one time there are many projects running, to develop new exhibitions and refurbish the facilities. Project teams tend to be a heady mix of operations, engineering and curatorial (and scientific) people. Also at this time, a new Museum-wide project approval and prioritisation processes was about to be launched.

Crucial to success of the programme was the clear definition of the objectives. It was not designed to educate staff in the principles and techniques of project management. Rather it focused on ways to enhance collaboration, build a desire to work to shared goals and understand other functions’ ways of doing things.

To make it relevant, a project simulation was designed – a typical Museum project that would be topical and controversial – with milestone decision points that sub-teams were asked to address.

This generated a massive buzz of debate and argument! Of course, this is what often happened around any project table. The difference was that in this environment, the facilitators were able to stop, feedback and focus the groups on the real opportunities of truly listening to others’ views and reaching a solid consensus, based on project goals rather than departmental interests!

Secondly, it helped them to understand the roles and authority of teams, project managers, line managers and approval bodies. This was a true revelation for some, who’d been grounded in inter-department rivalry for so long.

Thirdly it helped them understand and commit to working with the new Museum Project Process.

Some quotes from team members:

· “I’ve realised how insular we are in our area – and there is a good mechanism for changing that”
· “We’ve had very little structure in the past – this will help greatly”
· “It put my project into the wider Museum picture”

Get in touch if you’d like to hear more!