A new project which fails looks similar to an old project which failed

A modern IT project fails for the same reasons than an old IT project failed, even in cloud computing or mobile phone era.

Pierre Hessler, advisor of Capgemini CEO, thinks so. He said so on the Oracle Cloud World stage in Paris. He started his career in 1965 in Switzerland as commercial engineer for IBM where he worked for 27 years. Afterwards he was part of Capgemini board from 1993 to 2003.

Failure reasons according to Pierre Hessler?

They can be explained by three words COMPLEXITY – SKILL – OBJECTIVE which give the characteristics of our projects World, yesterday as well as today. Three topics structuring our consulting-coaching-training missions on project management.

1. 1 “We underestimate what we have to do, we underestimate the complexity”

This difficulty is inherent to the pro-ject concept: what is before “ject” does not exist for now.

This original problem is emphasized by project teams practices. Two main facts :

•          A budgetary bias. To launch the project the manager tends to underestimate costs and risks which could have an impact on the launch. P-Val answer: having an ROI that the manager will be in charge along the project.
•          A dogma Quality-Cost-Period. Trying to optimize all these topics means to not chose anything. In the contrary, it is important to favor one of them and our experience at P-Val shows that the main item to favor is the period. If this one fails, the other ones will join and fail as well.

The idea is therefore to put your project in a Simple World around three ideas:

•           Shrink
•           Hide
•           Embody

1. 2“People do not have skills and abilities to do“

Project skills and behaviors are very different from what’s expected in an operational functioning. People need to overcome cognitive hurdles to be efficient in a project World.

Companies, like the Société Générale with its Project School, make a lot of efforts in that sense and we guide them in their training offers, based on PMI.

Practitioners share with us their difficulties between the theory and the practice: ability to do.

Indeed, project governance always faces the power of the organization already implemented. A Chinese quote explains that “projects are like fishes, they start to decompose from the head”. In that case, it is often the high level leadership which fails. This brings us to the next point:

1. 3“and project objectives are not clear enough”

How to analyze this sentence? Objectives are more and more shared. However, they remain in the old World, the one the project intends to change. For instance, if our project tends to create an internal department like HR and the objectives are based on the current World, they are far from your target, the expected World. This situation leads to ambiguous information.

During your project, elements are changing and you notice that these objectives do not give the right solution to the expected World.

To get clear and sustainable objectives, they have to be thought in the expected World and not in the old World.

Here is a summary of the three ideas to succeed your transformation project:

•          Being simple first
•          Engaged leadership
•          Target = expected World

Laurent Dugas