Recognizing Loser Projects

Michael Hatfield 

January 27, 2003

The ability to differentiate between winners and losers permeates virtually every aspect of our lives. Cadillac or Yugo, Bach or Nine Inch Nails, F-16s or Iraqi radar stations, the facility for quickly discerning the gold from the iron pyrite in our lives has a profound and long-lastingimpact on our power to maintain an upbeat, happy attitude.

 

The same is true of getting yourself involved in projects. Is the project you are considering awinner, or a loser? If it's a bad project, you could end up losing a significant intellectual andemotional investment once it crashes and burns, and the blame starts flying. Associate with awinner project, and your career could go to warp speed. How do you tell the difference?

 

While winning projects can display a dizzying variety of characteristics, losers will often havekey symptoms in common. Here, then, is a list of the top five indicators that your project is aloser.

 

Poor or non-existent scope definitionIf you have never been involved in a project with rampant scope creep, it's a thing to behold.Since the actual goals being worked remain in a state of flux, progress against the movingtarget is next to impossible. I witnessed a disaster of a project, where the scope was never clearly defined. What was being worked on that week was decided in Monday morningmeetings, after which some teams were suddenly tasked beyond belief, while others were justas suddenly idled. These teams changed week to week, so that the staff were alternatelyburied with work or terrified of being laid off. Morale plummeted, deadlines were missed,budgets blown. Few of the participants' reputations were spared.

 

Reluctance or refusal to use project controlsIf the project's manager is whining about the expense of a project controller--or is going out of his way to further some excuse for not creating a baseline and collecting status--run, do notwalk, to the nearest exit. Some time back the "phased approach" to implementing projectmanagement rigor became popular, with the lower-risk projects avoiding many aspects of theold Cost/Schedule Control System Criterion (C/SCSC). To this day, I'm convinced that thiswas a cynical ploy to get contractors to reveal project difficulties: If a project tried to avoid thecost and schedule controls, it meant they were in real trouble, and deserving of more scrutiny.

 

Lack of accountability for project performanceI must confess that there is a great amount of comic value in the legerdemain that some PMswill engage in order to avoid accountability for the rotten performance of their projects. Theywill tap contingency budgets to cover scope creep, process baseline change proposals topush out key milestones or refuse to show a variance at completion for projects that havepassed the 20 percent complete point. What's not funny is the amount of resources that arewasted while these buzzard-heads keep their PM titles, and the way the project staff is oftenheld accountable for project failure.

 

Project staff avoids communicating bad news upwardsThis problem is occasionally caused by overly ambitious or confident staff members whobelieve that they can resolve any technical difficulties by themselves, and alerting higher-upsto possible problems constitutes a career-limiting move. However, in the majority of cases, itis my experience that this minefield is planted by managers and higher-ups who react toproject trouble with the sole tactic of pushing the staff harder. And who would want to engagein behavior that leads to more whip-cracking?

 

Schedule deadlines set at high levels of managementMost PMs will agree that activity-based costing is a good idea, so why hasn't activity-basedscheduling become more prevalent? But the practice of having executives set completion

 

dates, often on an extraordinarily arbitrary fashion, is a guaranteed schedule-wrecker, and aproject whose schedule is not properly managed is a project headed for disaster.

 

If you find yourself in a project that is displaying one or more of these symptoms, try to makea discreet exit. If leaving the project is really not an option, don't despair--in the movie aboutyour disaster, your character might be played by Leonardo DiCaprio or Kate Winslet!