Not every project you undertake as a leader is going to work out and you will be called on to pull the plug. No doubt you’ve seen this already in your engineering career. According to Project Management Institute, only 62% of projects met their original goals and business intent. Their analysis into projects worldwide indicated that for every $1 billion spent in projects, $135 million was at risk from failure. Put another way, 13.5% of every project dollar you will touch is at risk.
As a leader you’re responsible as much for project success and protection of resources as you are for your team’s performance. In fact, in most organizations failure to deliver projects within cost, on time, and within scope on a consistent basis will result in a sacking. However, sometimes a project will far exceed resources or require someone new with the skills to get it back on track.
As an leader, you’re responsible for maintaining awareness about your projects and knowing when to cut losses and cancel a project or ask for help from an outside entity who can get the project back on track.
It’s about risk assessment and performance measurement
Any engineering organization engaged in major project work has a process for measuring performance of projects. This is the first place to start, understanding the process used to develop and present the performance measures of the projects in your organization and those directly under your control.
The next step is to understand how your organization undertakes risk assessment for projects. Every project we lead is fraught with risk and as the leader, it’s your responsibility to properly mitigate the risk. In many organizations, however, a proper risk assessment isn’t conducted, leading to statistics like this from a McKinsey & Company assessment of IT projects in 2012:
- 17 percent of large IT projects go so badly that they can threaten the very existence of the company
- On average, large IT projects run 45 percent over budget and 7 percent over time, while delivering 56 percent less value than predicted
The final step after you understand the processes used for performance measurement and risk assessment in your organization is to make modifications to them to suit your team’s situation. Not every process fits the project at hand or the people that are managing the project. If you need to make adjustments to the processes for measuring performance and assessing risk, then do so.
4 Questions to Keep You Aligned and Give You Distance
Beyond performance measures and risk assessment tools, the leader needs to employ some intuition and reflection in assessing the viability of project underway. Think about the statistics on major IT projects above. Why would a company with intelligent project managers and engineers continue to execute a failing project that might lead to the company’s failure? No doubt they have performance measures and someone has conducted risk assessments. But they continue to plod onwards, potentially towards complete failure.
They do this because they’ve lost alignment with the project’s original scope and are unable to distance themselves to see it. Giving yourself distance from a serious issue will create the gap into which better decisions can be introduced. Some questions that you can use to create the gap include:
- What is the desired outcome of this project?
- Where is the project in achieving this outcome?
- What are the additional resources needed to achieve the desired outcome?
- Is the outcome still aligned with our strategy?
Bottom line: Leadership in an engineering organization is complex. You need the right mix of soft-skills to guide, support, and engage people and teams, as well as the technical skills to keep a project on the critical path. Find a coach, someone who has already achieved this meld of the soft and technical skills, to support you as you embark on the most rewarding phase of your engineering career: Engineering Leadership. Failing the ability to find a coach where you are, I recommend checking out Anthony Fasano’s Institute for Engineering Career Development.
If you like this post, then check these out:
5 Skill’s You Need to Hone to Ensure Successful Project Management (External Link to The Engineer Leader blog)
3 Tips to Make Your Conversations Exceptional
Reference:
1. "Facts and Figures." Http://calleam.com/WTPF/?page_id=1445. International Project Leadership Academy, n.d. Web. 24 Jan. 2015.
2. "The High Cost of Low Performance." Project Management Institute Pulse of the Profession (2013): n. pag. Https://www.pmi.org/~/media/PDF/Business-Solutions/PMI-Pulse%20Report-2013Mar4.ashx. Project Management International. Web. 24 Jan. 2015.
Christian Knutson, P.E., PMP is international infrastructure development program manager, engineer, and author. He has 21 years of experience in leadership, management, engineering and international relations earned from a career in the U.S. Air Force and is author of The Engineer Leader, a recognized blog on leadership and life success for engineers and professionals.
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