I’m An Executive, Get Me Out Of Here!
Executives fear projects.
Projects’ poor history of results and value delivery makes being associated with projects a bit of a death sentence.
To make things worse, when they try to ensure their project succeeds they often make things worse.
“We did well,” an executive once explained to me, “we came in only 70% over budget!”
But did this executive do better than another that drove his project to come in on time and budget by reducing the scope until his project’s potential realisable value had almost disappeared?
Executives are often bemused when I ask why their projects exist, what their ‘standard’ for success is and which measures of success they actually measure. They’ve never thought of these questions.
Let’s start with the absolute basic question — why do we do projects?
We do projects to move from where we are - to a new state - that we believe will deliver greater value than doing nothing.
This ‘value’ may be financial, greater flexibility, increased compliance, reduced errors, or whatever.
This value, however, is not a ‘hoped for’ aftermath of the project, but the whole reason for the project.
In Conclusion
“Value delivery” is what projects are all about. However, most measures of project success are not value-focused. The most standard measure of success is “the successful delivery of the project” (i.e. on time, on budget, to specification). But is that right? Does this measure ensure the value was delivered?
Value delivery management research shows the answer is “No”. If you don’t focus on delivering the business value, you’ll miss most of the value available.
When you do focus on value delivery executives will want to own their projects.
Focus wins. It’s that simple.
Note : VDM enables full business involvement in projects. Now there’s an idea!
