Archive for the ‘portfolio management’ Category
Politics and counter-politics in project evaluation
Introduction
Ideally, project evaluation decisions should be made on the basis of objective criteria (cost/benefit, strategic value etc.). In reality, however, there is often a political dimension to the process: personal agendas, power games etc. play a significant role in determining how key stakeholders perceive particular projects. In a paper entitled Seven Ways to get Your Favoured IT Project Accepted – Politics in IT Evaluation, Egon Berghout, Menno Nijland and Kevin Grant discuss seven political ploys that managers use to influence IT project selection. This post presents a discussion of these tactics and some strategies that can be used to counter them.
The seven tactics
Before outlining the tactics it is worth mentioning some of the differences between political and rational justifications for a project. In general, the former are characterised by a lot of rhetoric and platitudes whereas the latter dwell on seemingly objective measures (ROI, cost vs. benefit etc.). Further, political justifications tend to take a “big picture” view as opposed to the detail-oriented focus of the rational ones. Finally, it is worth mentioning that despite their negative connotation, political ploys aren’t always bad – there are situations in which they can lead to greater buy-in and commitment than would be possible with purely rational decision-making methods.
With that for background, let’s look at seven commonly used political tactics used to influence IT project decisions. Although the moves described are somewhat stereotypical and rather obvious, I do believe they are used quite often on real-world projects.
Here they are:
1. Designate the project as being strategic: In this classic ploy, the person advocating the project designates a project as being necessary in order to achieve the organisation’s strategic goals. To do this one may only need to show a tenuous connection between the project objectives and the organisation’s strategy. Once a project is deemed as being strategic, it will attract support from the upper echelons of management – no questions asked.
2. The “lights on” ploy: This strategy is to dub the project as an operational necessity. Here the idea is to indulge in scare-mongering by saying things like – “if we don’t do this, we run an 80% chance of system failure within the next year.” Such arguments are often used to justify expensive upgrades to legacy systems.
3. The “phase” tactic: Here the idea is to slice up a project into several smaller sub-projects and pursue them one at a time. This strategy keeps things under the organisation’s financial radar until the project is already well under way, a technique often used by budget-challenged IT managers.
4. Creative analysis: Most organisations have a standard process by which IT projects are evaluated. Typically such processes involve producing metrics to support the position that the project is worth pursuing. The ideas here is to manipulate the analysis to support the preferred decision. Some classic ways of doing this include ignoring negative aspects (certain risks, say) and/or overstating the benefits of desired option.
5. Find a problem for your solution: This strategy is often used to justify introducing a cool new technology into an organisation. The idea here is to create the perception that the organisation has a problem (where there isn’t necessarily one) and that the favoured technology is the only way out of it. See my post on solutions in search problems for a light-hearted look at warning signs that this strategy is in use.
6. No time for a proposal: Here the idea is to claim that it would take too much time to do a proper evaluation (the implication being that the person charged with doing the evaluation is too busy with other important matters). If successful, one can get away with doing a bare-bones evaluation which leaves out all inconvenient facts and details.
7. Old wine in a new bottle: This strategy is employed with unsuccessful project proposals. The idea here is to resubmit the proposal with cosmetic changes in the hope that it gets past the evaluation committee. Sometimes a change in the title and focus of the project is all that’s needed to sneak it past an unwary bunch of evaluators.
Of course, as mentioned earlier, there’s a degree of exaggeration in the above: those who sanction projects are not so naïve as to be taken in by the rather obvious strategies mentioned above. Nevertheless, I would agree with Berghout et. al. that more subtle variants of these strategies are sometimes used to push projects that would otherwise be given the chop.
Countering politics
The first step in countering political ploys such as the ones listed above is to understand when they are being used. The differences between political and rational behaviour were outlined by Richard Daft in his book on organisational theory and design. These are summarised in the table below (adapted from the paper):
| Organisational Feature relating to decision making | Rational response or behaviour | Political response or behaviour |
| Goals | Similar for all participants – aligned with organisational goals | Diversity of goals, depending on preferences and personal agendas |
| Processes | Rational, orderly. | Haphazard – determined by dominant group |
| Rules/Norms | Optimisation – to make the “best” decision (based on objective criteria) | Free for all – characterised by conflict |
| Information | Unambiguous and freely available to everyone | Ambiguous, can be withheld for strategic reasons |
| Beliefs about cause-effect | Known, even if only incompletely | Disagreement about cause-effect relationships |
| Basis of decisions | Maximisation of utility | Bargaining, interplay of interests |
| Ideology | Organisational efficiency and effectiveness | Individual/ group interest |
Although Daft’s criteria can help identify politically influenced decision-making processes, it is usually pretty obvious when politics takes over. The question then is: what can one do to counter such tactics?
The authors suggest the following:
1. Go on the offensive: This tactic hinges on finding holes in the opponents’ arguments and proposals. Another popular way is to attack the credibility of the individuals involved.
2. Develop a support base-: Here the tactic is to get a significant number of people to buy into your idea. Here it is important to focus efforts on getting support from people who are influential in the organisation.
3. Hire a consultant: This is a frequently used tactic, where one hires an “independent” consultant to research and support one’s favoured viewpoint.
4. Quid pro quo: This is the horse-trading scenario where you support the opposing group’s proposal with the understanding that they’ll back you on other matters in return.
Clearly these tactics are not those one would admit to using, and indeed, the authors’ language is somewhat tongue-in-cheek when they describe these. That said, it is true that such tactics – or subtle variants thereof – are often used when countering politically motivated decisions regarding the fate of projects.
Finally, it is important to realise that those involved in decision making may not even be aware that they are engaging in political behaviour. They may think they are being perfectly rational, but may in reality be subverting the process to suit their own ends.
Conclusion
The paper presents a practical view on how politics can manifest itself in project evaluation. The authors’ focus on specific tactics and counter tactics makes the paper particularly relevant for project professionals. Awareness of these tactics will help project managers recognise the ways in which politics can be used to influence decisions as to whether or not projects should be given the go-ahead .
In closing it is worth noting the role of politics in collective decision-making of any kind. A group of people charged with making a decision will basically argue it out. Individuals (or sub-groups) will favour certain positions regarding the issue at hand and the group must collectively debate the pros and cons of each position. In such a process there is no restriction on the positions taken and the arguments presented for and against them. The ideas and arguments needn’t be logical or rational – it is enough that someone in the group supports them. In view of this it seems irrational to believe that collective decision making – in IT project evaluation or any other domain – can ever be an entirely rational process.
Thinking outside the BOKs
Introduction
Mainstream project management practices are codified in various “bodies of knowledge” (BOKs) that serve as definitive guides or standards for the profession. This formalization of project management knowledge serves to propagate and legitimize practices regardless of their actual utility. Moreover, it also leads to a perception that project management practices are domain-independent. In a recent paper entitled, 21st century project management = open source body of knowledge, Jon Whitty calls for an open source approach to the development and dissemination of project management knowledge, with a view to addressing the aforementioned limitations of the “BOK-centric” paradigm. This post summarises the main ideas presented in the paper.
Why step outside the BOKs?
According to Whitty, many project management tools and techniques have become standard practice for reasons other than their utility. Some of these reasons include:
- Techniques that are easy to replicate (copy and pass on to others) have a greater chance of acceptance, regardless of whether they are useful or not. This point is discussed at length in my post on the memetic view of project management.
- Techniques that give project managers (and their managers) an emotional affect have a better chance of acceptance. See my post on emotional effect of project management artefacts for more on this.
As Whitty puts it, “One might say that we have been duped or perhaps more poetically speaking romanced by some aspects of modern project management…”
The main consequence of the above is that “standard” project management knowledge as embodied in books and BOKs isn’t necessarily a reflection of how project management is (or even, should be) practiced. Yet this is the official, authorized version of knowledge, used to train and certify project managers.
Another point that Whitty makes is that despite of the discipline’s attempt to rid itself of domain specific connotation, project management (in practice) is domain specific – there is a difference, say, between a corporate reporting system project and a health care project. It is wishful thinking to expect that a project manager will be able run a project in an unfamiliar area without first learning a bit about the domain. Consequently, Whitty writes that:
…we must acknowledge that each domain of work (e.g. health, arts, sciences, education) is capable of evolving its own methods for managing projects if given the freedom to do so. I suggest there is a moral obligation on all scholars and practitioners of project management to enable these domain specific methods to emerge…
Another point that I would add in support of Whitty’s arguments is that there is a difference between project management theory and project management practice (see this paper, for example). Projects are seldom, if ever, run by the book; it is a fact that most project managers do “think outside the BOKs” when practicing their profession. A body of knowledge reflecting how projects are actually run in practice would thus be very different from the prescriptions presented in books and BOKs.
Project management as a (controlled) democracy
To address the issues mentioned in the previous section, Whitty suggests democratizing project management knowledge by:
- A bottom-up approach to project decision making, involving all stakeholders, rather than a top-down approach implicitly advocated by books and BOKs.
- The recognition that project management needs to be tailored to the needs of specific domains, rather than striving for the lowest common denominator of domain independent tools and techniques.
- An open source approach to project management knowledge whereby anyone can contribute techniques and case studies based on their own (possibly domain specific) experiences.
- A culture that enables project managers to report their specific practices (and failures) without fear of reprisals.
Whitty clarifies that open source means more than free access. Among other things, it offers a means by which
- New techniques can be shared and evaluated by practicing project managers and academics.
- Domain specific project management knowledge can be compiled, tested and disseminated. This knowledge will evolve as it is supported (or refuted) through case studies and other data contributed by practitioners.
Obviously open source does not mean that anything goes; that would be a recipe for chaos and confusion. Oversight is needed to ensure that the repository is coherent and meaningful, and that contributed material meets certain quality standards. This is nothing new – most open source efforts operate this way already – Wikipedia being the closest in spirit to the one proposed by Whitty.
The role of professional organisations in an OS-BOK world
What role would professional organisations have in such an open source BOK world? Here’s what Whitty thinks,
The implications for an open source body of knowledge for project management will be significant for the current project management professional associations who control existing BOKs, particularly the PMI who hold the intellectual property to the current Guide. The PMI and others will need to abandon their ideals for creating a professional class of project managers. They could take a leadership role in the development and on‐going coordination of the human and technological mechanisms that develop and maintain the OS‐PMBOK and validate the source evidence of the various knowledge libraries. Their role might also be more like that of a vocational skills awarding body. As the various domain specific bodies of knowledge for project management emerge, the project management associations could have a place in developing and administering specific project management certification in conjunction with key industry bodies that represent the various domains. The project management associations will also need to establish new alliances with the academic community and lend support, cooperation, and channel industry funding towards evidence-based practice research.
Many of the activities listed by Whitty are already carried out by most professional project management organisations. As I see it, these organisations would continue to play an important role in developing the profession. However, they would no longer be the arbiters of what is legitimate and what isn’t.
Conclusion
Existing project management knowledge tells us how projects should be managed, not how they are actually managed. Seen in this light, Whitty’s proposal for an open source approach to project management makes eminent sense. Such an approach may lead to a body of knowledge that reflects the diverse ways in which project management is practiced in various (corporate and national) cultures and domains.
Doing the right project is as important as doing the project right
Introduction
Many high profile projects fail because they succeed. This paradoxical statement is true because many projects are ill-conceived efforts directed at achieving goals that have little value or relevance to their host organisations. Project management focuses on ensuring that the project goals are achieved in an efficient manner. The goals themselves are often “handed down from above”, so the relevance or appropriateness of these is “out of scope” for the discipline of project management. Yet, the prevalence of projects of dubious value suggests that more attention needs to be paid to “front-end” decision making in projects – that is, decision making in the early stages, in which the initiative is just an idea. A paper by Terry Williams and Knut Samset entitled, Issues in front-end decision making on Projects looks at the problems associated with formulating the “right” project. This post is a summary and review of the paper.
What is the front-end phase of the project? According to Williams and Samset, “The front-end phase commences when the initial idea is conceived and proceeds to generate information, consolidate stakeholders’ views and positions, and arrive at the final decision as to whether or not to finance the project.”
Decisions made in the early stages of a project are usually more consequential than those made later on. Most major parameters – scope, funding, timelines etc. are more or less set in stone by the time a project is initiated. The problem is that these decisions are made at a time when the availability of relevant information is at its lowest. This highlights the role of sound judgement and estimation in decision making. Furthermore, these decisions may have long-term consequences for the organisation, so due care needs to be given to alignment of the project concept with the organisation’s strategic goals. Finally, as the cliché goes, the only constant is change: organisations exist in ever-changing environments, so projects need to have the right governance structures in place to help navigate through this turbulence. The paper is an exploration of some of these issues as they relate to front-end decision making in projects.
Defining the project concept
Williams and Samset define the terms concept as a mental construction that outlines how a problem will be solved or a need satisfied. Note that although the definition seems to imply that the term concept equates to technical approach, it is more than that. The project concept also includes considerations of the outcomes and their impact on the organisation and its environment.
The authors emphasise that organisations should to conceive several distinct concepts prior to initiating the project. To this end, they recommend having a clearly defined “concept definition phase” where the relevant stakeholders create and debate different concepts. Choosing the right concept is critical because it determines how the project will be carried out, what the end result is and how it affects the organisation. The authors emphasise that the concept should be determined on the basis of the required outcome rather than the current (undesirable) situation.
When success leads to failure
This is the point alluded to in the introduction: a project may produce the required outcomes, but still be considered a failure because the outcomes are not aligned with the organisation’s strategy. Such situations almost always arise because the project concept was not right. The authors describe an interesting example of such a project, which I’ll quote directly from the paper:
One such example is an onshore torpedo battery built inside the rocks on the northern coast of Norway in 2004 (Samset, 2008a). The facility was huge and complex, designed to accommodate as many as 150 military personnel for up to three months at a time. It was officially opened as planned and without cost overrun. It was closed down one week later by Parliamentary decision. Clearly, a potential enemy would not expose its ships to such an obvious risk: the concept had long since been overtaken by political, technological, and military development. What was quite remarkable was that this project, which can only be characterized as strategic failure, got little attention in the media, possibly because it was a success in tactical terms.
A brilliant example of a successful project that failed! The point, of course, is that although the strategic aspects of projects are considered to be outside the purview of project management, they must be given due consideration when the project is conceptualized. The result of a project must be effective for the organisation, the efficiency of project execution actually matters less.
Shooting straight – aligning the project to strategic goals
Aligning projects with strategic goals is a difficult because the organizational and social ramifications of a project are seldom clear at the start. This is because the problem may be inherently complex – for example, no one can foresee the implications of an organizational restructure (no, not even those expensive consultants who claim to be able to). Further, and perhaps more important, is the issue of social complexity: stakeholders have diverse, often irreconcilable, views on what needs to be done, let alone how it should be done. These two factors combine to make most organizational issues wicked problems.
Wicked problems have no straightforward solutions, so it is difficult if not impossible to ensure alignment to organizational strategy. There are several techniques that can be used to make sense of wicked problem. I’ve discussed one of these – dialogue mapping – in several prior posts. Paul Culmsee and I have elaborated on this and other techniques to manage wicked problems in our book, The Heretic’s Guide to Best Practices.
One has to also recognize that the process of alignment is messier still because politics and self interest play a role, particularly when the stakes are high. Further, at the individual level, decisions are never completely objective and are also subject to cognitive bias – which brings me to the next point…
Judgement and the formulation of organizational strategy
Formulating organizational strategy depends on making informed and accurate judgements about the future. Further, since strategies typically cover the mid to long term, one has to also allow some flexibility for adjustments along the way as one’s knowledge improves.
That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t take into account the fact that decision making isn’t a wholly rational process – humans who make the decisions are, at best, boundedly rational (sometimes rational, sometimes not). Bounded rationality manifests itself through cognitive biases – errors of perception that can lead us to making incorrect judgements. See my post on the role of cognitive bias in project failure for more on how these biases have affected high profile projects.
The scope for faulty decision making (via cognitive bias or any other mechanism) is magnified when one deals with wicked problems. There are a number of reasons for this including:
- Cause-effect relationships are often unclear.
- No one has complete understanding of the problem (the problem itself is often unclear).
- Social factors come into play (Is it possible make an “unbiased” decision about a proposed project that is going to affect one’s livelihood?)
- Consequent from points 1 through 3, stakeholders perceive the problem (and its solution) differently.
It is worth pointing out that project planning is generally “less wicked” than strategy formulation because the former involves more clear cut goals (even though they may be wrong-headed). There is more scope for wickedness in the latter because there are many more unknowns and “unknowables.”
Why estimates are incorrect
Cost is a major factor in deciding whether or not a project should go-ahead. Unfortunately, this is another front-end decision; one which needs to be made when there isn’t enough information available. In his book, Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering, Robert Glass names poor estimation as one of the top causes of project failure. This is not to say that things haven’t improved. For example, Agile methods which advocate incremental/iterative development continually refine initial estimates based on actual, measurable progress.
Techniques such as reference class forecasting have been proposed to improve estimation for projects where incremental approaches are not possible (infrastructural projects, for example). However, this technique is subject to the reference class problem.
Finally, all the aforementioned techniques assume that reliable information on which estimates can be based is a) available and b) used correctly. But this is just where the problem lies: the two key factors that lead to poor estimation are a) the lack of knowledge about what exactly the work entails and b) the fact that people may misunderstand or even misrepresent the information if it is available.
Governance in an ever-changing environment
A negative consequence of the quest for organizational agility and flexibility is that organizational environments are turbulent. The main point of the paper is that traditional project management (as laid out in frameworks such as PMBOK) Is ill-suited to such environments. As they state:
The key point in this article, however, is that the environment in which most projects operate is complex and turbulent, and conventional project management is not well suited to such conditions, despite the attraction of project organization to companies in fast-moving environments seeking agility and responsiveness…
Yet, ironically, this uncertainty is the reason for the spectacular growth in adoption of project management methodologies (see this post for a discussion of a relevant case study).
For project management to be truly useful, it must be able to cope with and adapt to turbulent environments. To this end, it may be best to view project management as a set of activities that emerge from a real need rather than an arbitrary imposition dictated by methodologies that are divorced from reality. This is nothing new: iterative/incremental methods, which advocate adaptation of methods to suit the environment, are a step in this direction.
Adaptive methods are obviously easier to apply on smaller projects than larger ones. However, one could argue that the need for flexibility and adaptability is even greater on massive megaprojects than smaller ones. A major consequence of a changing environment is that people’s views on what needs to be done diverge. Recent work in applying dialogue mapping to large project environments shows that it is possible to reduce this divergence. Getting people on the “same page” is, I believe, the first step to successful governance, particular in unstable environments.
Lack of information
The most important decisions on projects have to be made upfront, when little or no reliable information is available. The authors argue that the lack of information can actually be a benefit in front-end decision for the following reasons:
- Too much information can lead to confusion and analysis paralysis.
- Information can get out of date quickly – forecasts based on outdated information can be worse than useless because they can mislead.
- It is often hard to tell between important and irrelevant information. The distinction may only become clear as the project proceeds.
Be that as it may, one cannot deny that front-end decision making is hampered by the lack of relevant information. The real problem, though, is that decisions are often made by those who cannot tell the difference between what’s important and what’s not.
Conclusion
The article is an excellent summary of the major impediments in front-end decision making on projects. Such decisions have a major impact on how the project unfolds, yet they are often made with little or no consideration of what exactly the project will do for the organisation, or what its impact will be.
In my experience, front-end decisions are invariably made in an ad-hoc manner, rooted more in hope and fantasy than reality. A first step to ensuring that organizations do the right project is to ensure that all stakeholders have a common understanding of the goals of the project – that is, what needs to be done. The next is to ensure a common understanding of how those goals will be achieved. Such stakeholder alignment is best achieved using communication-centric, collaborative techniques such as dialogue mapping. Only then, after ensuring that one is doing the right project, does it make sense to focus on doing the project right.
Eight to Late 