During the ensuing discourse respondents from around the world posted not less than 18 different answers to this question.

Among the responses were answers such as “having poor stakeholder involvement,” “not enough project planning,” “poorly documented requirements,” “the budget being too small or poorly estimated,” and “the [project] goal is not consistent.” To be sure, many of these 18 answers are highly relevant to the success of a project — and yet, every single answer was wrong. None of the 18 responses identified the single, most common mistake of project managers.

In fact, each answer emphasizes the root of the problem: Too many project managers are focused on the day-to-day problems of the project and have lost sight of their overall strategy. They are thinking tactically, putting out fires, rather than strategically — making sure the fires never happen in the first place.

Take, for example, a few of the more common issues raised in this discussion:

1. Poor stakeholder involvement. Let’s assume for a minute that we have a solution to this problem — perhaps, for example, a project manager has correctly identified all the stakeholders, put together a great communication plan to keep the stakeholders informed, and succeeds in building a collaborative environment with the stakeholders “at the table” on a regular basis. If this solves the problem of stakeholder involvement, does it actually save most of the projects that go off the rails?
2. The budget was too small. Again, let’s assume that the right process was used to estimate the project from the start, and that the project manager uses a solid method for measuring performance, cost, and schedule (say, Performance Based Earned Value). Certainly, budget overrun is a common problem, but would this actually solve most project problems?
3. Poorly documented requirements. In my experience, every requirement is poorly documented to start with — so, let’s assume that the right approach is taken to turn poor requirements into great requirements. Quality assurance is involved early, a full-circle approach ties requirements to work product to acceptance, excellent change management is used, and stakeholders provide a final consensus. Will producing great requirements really save more projects than any other strategy?

The list, of course, goes on quite a long ways — and that’s the point. The list is long, and every single item raised is a valid concern for project managers. But with 18 different root causes on the table, could any one of them really make that much difference is the overall landscape?

These are all tactical solutions to specific project problems. So what’s the big picture? What is the one thing that would actually make the biggest difference, that would actually address many, perhaps even most of these 18 different issues?

Let’s take another look at KPMG’s survey of 252 organizations, and their subsequent findings. According to the study, inadequate project management implementation constitutes 32% of project failures, lack of communication constitutes 20%, and unfamiliarity with scope and complexity constitutes 17%. Taken together, 69% of project failures ultimately trace back to poorly implemented project management practices. What this means is simple: Project managers need to step back from the tactical, day-to-day fire fighting, and take a more strategic view. Adopting the right project management strategy will address most of the problems at hand.

How so? Let’s reconsider those first three project issues above.

1. Poor stakeholder involvement. A thorough project plan, adopted out of an appropriate project management methodology that is fit for the purpose, will place the right emphasis on stakeholder involvement. It will also provide the right tactical tools make sure stakeholders are involved, and appropriate measures should stakeholder involvement begin to fail.
2. Budget problems. A correctly selected project management methodology will put the right emphasis on budget analysis, and will provide the right tools to stay on top of the budget. The project manager may need to look outside his or her own skill set to manage to those requirements — but the methodology will establish the goals, the tools, and the metrics from which deviation triggers a red flag.
3. Poor requirements. The right project management plan will include appropriate methods, probably mandated as part of a technical requirements standard, for developing strong requirements. The plans will include adequate validation and verification of requirements — possibly through strong quality assurance measures. Again, all of these tactical solutions will become part of the project and solve the overarching problem.

So, the root cause of project failure — in fact, of 69% of project failures, according to KPMG’s study — is failing at the strategic level to identify and implement appropriate project management practices.

This means choosing the right standards and methodologies for the project. For instance, if tight quality and budget is a concern, more rigorous controls in this regard are needed. That probably means shunning simple methodologies such as lightweight, agile methods in favor of something that uses more ceremony and process (such as that defined in the PMBOK® and other classical project management approaches). It also means sticking to your guns and making sure the methodology is applied. Showing the methodology to the team and putting it on a bookshelf won’t cut it. Application is the key, and that means recognizing that the standards, practices, and procedures are there for a reason — don’t take shortcuts, because doing so means introducing risks to your project’s health.

Related posts:

1. Doing away with ineffective, broken risk management
2. Managing risk in global projects
3. Tackling the global project problem

This is exactly what Richard D. Fain, chairman and C.E.O. of Royal Caribbean Cruises, did when he wanted to find out whether investing in new computer systems or better company policies was a worthwhile idea. He organized a mock trial consisting of two teams of six people. Each team was given a position to defend, and two months to prepare their arguments for or against the planned upgrade.

“I had heard endlessly beforehand why we needed to do each of the things,” says Fain (New York Times). Fain sat as one of five judges listening to the debate between the teams. He also organized a jury of 40 employees to watch the entire proceeding. In the end, rather than proceed with both projects as originally planned, only one of them was launched. The debate structure provided a powerful forum in which to vet and defend ideas. “All of a sudden, you saw elements that nobody had raised, so you saw weaknesses on both sides,” said Fain.

Putting your ideas on trial is a fantastic exercise to explore and vet an idea’s viability. Perhaps equally important is that it’s also a powerful team building exercise. By creating teams and a mock jury, the entire company takes part in the decision making process. People love to be challenged and show off their capabilities — even when tasked with taking the “opposing counsel” individuals will shine. Since it’s a game, it becomes a way to show off and demonstrate depth of understanding and skill.

Related posts:

1. Successfully applying lessons learned
2. Tackling the global project problem
3. Fix your boss (or, reduce risk to quality using a matrix approach)

Every individual is different, and every situation is going to require a different response. Temper tantrums, sexist remarks, chronic lateness, information hoarding, playing favourites … people don’t always behave themselves at work. An adept manager needs to understand the individual nuances of the situation and act accordingly. You need finesse, insight into your team, an understanding of psychology, and often, incredible patience. Here are a few strategies that I always like to try.

1. Engage the malcontent

Quite often, the negative attitude comes from feelings of being disengaged from the team or the project. Perhaps the individual thinks he could do the job better; perhaps he isn’t working on what he wants to work on; or, just feels the project is heading in the wrong direction. Most often negativity stemming from these problems will surface in a team setting, such as passive aggressive behavior, grumbling, openly showing dislike for decisions. I like to engage this individual in finding a solution. Hand accountability to that individual and, in essence, give full reign to fix the problem. With accountability often comes responsibility — and the need to realize that decisions are not always quite as simple as they appear on the surface. Of course, sometimes the individual makes a mistake — but in this case, the lesson is still learned. They “get their way,” but also find out that “their way” wasn’t, afterall, the right way. Of course you’ve got to strive for a better outcome — assign responsibility, and then back them up. Make sure they’ve got resources and help in the decision making process. Hopefully it becomes a learning experience for everyone.

2. Reach consensus

Sometimes it’s not practical to let an individual run with their own ideas. Yet, still you have someone that feels “things” are heading in the wrong direction. I like to try to reach consensus or, failing that, at least agreement that we’ve made the right choices given what we know. One approach is to schedule a round table with the malcontent and his peers, perhaps 3-4 people. Discuss the problem, and try to reach agreement on direction. In the best case, his peers will sway his opinion. More often, the complexities, choices and decisions that have led to the current situation will be discussed — and the “black and white” situation fades in favor of many choices, and trying to make “the best one.” With a little luck, the malcontent employee walks out of the round table with two things: 1) a sense of having been engaged in the decision making process and 2) a new appreciation for the complexity at hand, and the decisions that have been made.

3. Make it clear that it’s a team effort

A one-on-one discussion goes a long way. Spend some time with the individual and really try to listen, and understand what the problem is. Come up with some mutual objectives — some things for the individual to work on (these might be soft skills, such as being less negative) as well as some things for you to work on (these will be things to help ameliorate the bad attitude, such as making sure his opinion is part of the decision process). Make sure it’s mutual, and show some real effort here — there’s tremendous value in demonstrating how much you value each individual’s contribution. Work with the individual to address the problems and find solutions.

4. If all else fails…

If you still have a problem employee on your hand after making a sincere effort to fix the problem, you’ve got to make it clear that continued negative behavior will not be tolerated. You also need to be prepared, so document the problems. Keep a record. After some time, it will become a matter of reprimanding and giving specific, required objectives. This is the worst case scenario and more often that not, the first step toward losing an employee. Sometimes it’s a “wake up call” to the individual, but often this kind of heavy-handed approach just feeds the negativity. Be prepared for either outcome.

Wayne McHale was a senior manufacturing executive when he heard reports that one of his branch offices was getting fed up with the arrogant, condescending attitude of a new manager. He decided to pay a personal visit to the office and put an end to the situation right away. “I made it absolutely clear that while we were delighted to have him on the team, certain behaviours could not be tolerated in a team environment,” says Mr. McHale. “He was taken aback, initially, because I think the behaviours were somewhat ingrained. He was a star and had been told for too long that he was wonderful.”

Whatever the case, make sure you have a good documented history. You can use it when talking about the problem with the employee, making sure you have concrete references to poor behavior. In the worst case situation, you can also use it to back up termination papers.

Above all else, don’t be an enabler

Some organizations actually nurture bad behaviour, according to Lew Bayer, president and CEO of Civility Experts Worldwide. For example, an all-star employee with a primadonna attitude may be tolerated because a manager decides it’s too costly or too much hassle to seek a replacement. Or perhaps certain rules may not apply to someone who has formed a friendship with a senior manager. In situations like this, it’s often the boss that’s the problem.

You can’t avoid dealing with workplace performance issues — it will come back to haunt you in the long term. Perhaps other employees will get fed up and quit. The problem employee might have a temper tantrum in front of a client. It’s hard to predict but one thing is almost certain: It’s going to happen at the worst time, when stress is high and a lot is on the line. Ignoring the issue won’t make it go away; it will just get worse.

Don’t wait until the problem becomes a problem for everyone. Be proactive, and recognize that the workplace is above all a place for professionalism. If your star performer is worth keeping, coaching can help. If your disaffected team member needs to feel involved, a few changes can make that happen. But, only if he’s open to the idea. If not, it may be time to take more direct action in order to preserve the integrity of your team.

Related posts:

1. When there’s a freeloader on your team
2. Team-based performance is key, but only works with team input
3. Managing with blinders on

So is Agile just hype or is there something to it?

There are strengths to the agile way of thinking, and many of them bring useful perspectives to software and systems development that are new and even revolutionary. Here are some of the things that work — and, potentially, that radically change our old-world practices.

Whereas most legacy methods stem from industrial process — that is, assembling a product using a set of defined, predictable steps — the agile method is empirical. It recognizes that development is more like invention and research, more akin to scientific study, than assembly. This empirical nature is at the heart of the agile mantra: Deliver, measure, adjust and repeat. The strength of this approach often bears itself out in fantastically hyperproductive teams that deliver working product far more quickly than legacy methods, such as waterfall, could ever achieve.

Agile does this by cutting through complexity. Every agile-based methodology focuses on simplification of otherwise complicated problems. For example, XP and Scrum both emphasize development of near-term, complete deliverables. This means carving out tangible and reasonably independent pieces of work, focusing on that work, and then — at least as much as possible — moving on to other work. This approach requires that large, complex problems are broken down into manageable pieces and thought of on a micro-deliverable level. Likewise, this approach minimizes ceremony and eschews as much procedure as possible. Some agile methods go to extremes in this regard, focusing entirely on delivering work product and not at all on procedure. This translates into minimizing complexity on a large scale.

Closely related to eliminating complexity is agile’s focus on progress measurement. Most agile methods measure progress chiefly, if not exclusively, in terms of delivered work product. Most methods also are quite stringent in defining progress only when finished work is delivered, which means you can’t work for nine months on a single big feature. Instead, micro-deliverables target key features, deliver those features into the customer’s hands, then moving on to new features. This can be a huge strength because the customer gets working product in-hand to review early, and often. It involves the customer early in product evolution, leading to a host of benefits including better product targeting, prioritized development and improved quality.

These characteristics of agile methods combine to fundamentally change the way software and systems development is practiced. Agile also empowers individuals to become stellar performers. In fact, all forms of agile rely on this to some degree — with more lightweight agile methods being completely dependent on individual empowerment. The idea is that an empowered team will leap over constraints to get the job done, no matter how “out of the box” the thinking needs to be. It’s a refreshing concept and one that can indeed be supremely successful, but it does require the team to embrace the idea wholeheartedly.

Another benefit, at least in some situations, is the creation of self-organizing teams. Partly because of the light ceremony, the fast pace, and the penchant for empowerment and accountability, teams become self-organizing. This works when the team has the right make-up, as individuals step up to take on tasks best suited to individual skills. Self-organized, empowered teams become very powerful and very productive, provided that the team members are up to the job.

There is absolutely no doubt that agile methods make it possible to get things done quickly. That’s what it’s all about, after all. The real question to me is how much of this tradeoff is really desirable? How often do we want to eschew process and maturity in favor of getting things done quickly?

More importantly: Can we effectively merge the best attributes of Agility with the most valuable benefits of established processes and standards?

Why Agile doesn’t work

When an agile project fails, it generally does so spectacularly and predictably. The common failings of agile-based projects are just that… common. We see the same problems over and over again, and this has become the basis for many critiques of agile methodology. After all, if we keep seeing the same problems crop up again and again, isn’t this proof enough that the process is flawed? This becomes clear in hindsight, so why do we continue to see 90 percent of projects missing the mark?

The fact is, agile by itself is just one tool in the toolbox that should be applied with other implements of the trade. In my experience, the problem comes in most often because small- and mid-sized organizations experience brilliant success with agile and then assume it can work everywhere. They throw out the toolbox (or perhaps never buy one in the first place). Yes, agile can succeed. Yes, it can deliver fantastic productivity and stellar results. But not always — in fact, I will go so far as to say not often.

This isn’t because of agile’s limitations. Instead, it’s because of overconfidence by those putting it to use, and the mistakes an immature organization makes as it grows and applies it inappropriately.

Immature companies and teams are cutting their teeth, again and again, on the limitations of agile.

All agile methods make it easy to oversimplify complexity. In fact, agile’s strength of eliminating complexity might be better stated as “ignoring complexity.” There are appropriate situations for this but, more often than not, ignoring complexity leads to problems. Most business cases don’t call for undefined delivery dates or loosely changing requirements and partial deliveries. These are risks that most business models are incompatible with. If the risks aren’t something that your business can sustain, adopting a purely agile process is taking a huge gamble.

Likewise, focusing on the near-term is an agile attribute that introduces a lot of unknowns into the business-end of an equation. Few people will contend that agile is appropriate for mission critical efforts such as, say, launch vehicle development, as sometimes requirements need to be set in stone before anyone starts development. But what about situations where some degree of fuzziness is acceptable or even beneficial? Agile advocates compatibility with change, sidestepping change control procedures that would otherwise place tight controls over requirements. Requirements change carries with it a heavy burden, particularly when it comes to the cross-organizational impact to marketing, budget, quality management and the customer. However, cutting change control, requirements management, and configuration management from the process can lead to long-term disaster that the short-term perspective of most agile methods will overlook.

This theme of reducing structure and control has cut out many waterfall-origin processes. The danger often manifests as small-scale agile projects are successful, leading to wider-scale adoption of agile. But, as the projects grow in complexity and criticality, major missing components in the process become evident. For example, no agile methods today integrate comprehensive quality assurance procedures (in fact, thanks to some early mistakes, such as MIL-STD-498[#], most people think quality assurance is software testing — it’s not). Structured software testing often becomes an afterthought, and risk management programs tend to be regarded as “fuzzy disciplines.” Yet, these are the processes that successfully put man on the moon, that develop health care and financial services systems, and ensure that nuclear plant regulatory systems don’t fail after delivery. Of course, there is a cost to each of these processes, and every business needs to weigh the cost-benefit of adopting more process against cutting those processes. This needs to be an on-going evaluation, made as projects, organizations, and teams evolve — it’s not a decision that stands alone.

From a purely hands-on, management level, agile methods pose “people problems” as well. The strong emphasis on self-organization and empowerment can easily backfire. The former relies heavily on people that are capable of self-management and self-direction. Not everyone can live up to that expectation. The latter, delivering empowerment to the team and individual, can lead to a hero mentality and silo’d teams that refuse to play well with others. As projects grow in size, complexity, and dependency on other teams and resources, these characteristics become the drawback of an immature organization.

Almost all agile methods oversimplify valuable processes. In some situations, the project survives the oversimplification. Sometimes the business is tolerant of the fallout. In every case, agile methods expose the project to risks that stakeholders should be — and often are not — aware of.

What to do about it

We need to be cognizant that one solution does not fit all problems. While an agile method such as XP or Scrum may have led to success in one project, this doesn’t make it a foregone conclusion that it will do so again. Each project is different, and organizations evolve over time. Adopting one process to solve all problems is a sure recipe for failure. On the other hand, having a well-versed team that can draw on several methodologies, as appropriate for the job, is a recipe for success.

If your organization is looking for the one-size hammer to hit every nail, make sure it’s as configurable a hammer as possible. Don’t choose something that is either too lightweight, such as XP, because many projects will overreach the capabilities of such a lightweight process. Likewise, don’t try to implement a full-on waterfall style methodology either because, while definitely thorough and capable of getting the job done, it’s just overkill for many smaller projects. If you must choose a single process, pick one that’s efficient, borrows from both agile and waterfall, and is highly configurable, such as Rational Scrum or the Rational Unified Process. Both of these have the maturity to deliver large-scale projects, but also support starting small and adopting minimum ceremony.

A better awareness of what specific agile practices can and cannot accomplish is key. For example, Scrum is not a development methodology, and it cannot effectively deliver software or hardware projects unless it wraps itself around one. Yet today many organizations are employing Scrum as if it were a development methodology. I’ve even seen an organization of several hundred developers “force fed” Extreme Programming from the top down. The outcome of that particular operation: Mid-level management hid the fact that they didn’t use XP from top-level management after everyone realized what a mistake it was. Perhaps we’ll have to wait for mature standards in education and certification to evolve, but personally I’m not sitting idly by.

One of my personal pet peeves in the technology industry is a relative lack of standards and qualifications. Would you go to a doctor that didn’t have a medical degree? Would you hire an architect that didn’t have an appropriate engineering degree? Yet we hire software professionals (much less often hardware professionals) without adequate education, current qualifications, or meaningful certifications. For that matter, the proliferation of meaningless qualifications (such as Scrum Master certification) continues to weaken the industry. In the long run, we need better standards regarding education, accreditation and certification.

Understand agile methods for what they are. Keep in mind that lightweight process carries risk. Use the right tools in the right situation.

Coming full circle

If we add all of these things to agile methods, won’t we just end up using waterfall process all over again?

I don’t think so. Waterfall-based process, the original behemoth processes born out of industrial process, are widely recognized as inefficient. There are tremendous advantages to pressing forward with a merger between waterfall practices and agile practices. I hope the end result is a new generation of software and hardware development methodology — a generation that we’re just starting to see as processes such as Rational Scrum come to the fore. It’s time for development methodologies to evolve, and there’s no holding that back.

Related posts:

1. Making Scrum work: Common failings in adopting Scrum
2. Scrum is not an agile methodology
3. Common oversights in choosing methodology