Establishing firm project foundations

Does your organization fully assess feasibility? Do your projects take more time and money to deliver than originally planned?

AgilePM® has eight principles that are not only memorable but universal in nature in that they apply equally to any project managed in any industry or sector. What sets AgilePM apart is the concept of “building incrementally from firm foundations” before committing to significant costs and project development.

Like the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA) states in ‘Setting Up for Success’, “if we invest time and energy in setting projects up for success, sponsoring organizations and accountable officers can obtain a clearer overview of the project lifecycle and make any required design changes when the cost of making these changes is still relatively low”. This avoids what Bent Flyvbjerg (Professor of Major Programme Management at Oxford University's Saïd Business School) calls ‘blank cheque syndrome’ that leads to the ‘conspiracy of continuation’ that drives cost and cost overrun of unviable projects that are hardly ever stopped before incurring significant sunk costs. Whilst successful project initiation can take more time at the start, this will be repaid repeatedly later on in delivery.

It is for this reason that AgilePM advocates to first understand the scope of the business problem (both the cause and effects to customers) to be resolved and to identify proposed viable options for the proposed solution. However, not in such detail that the project becomes paralysed by overly detailed analysis of the business and technical requirements. As such, the feasibility phase is intended primarily to establish whether the proposed project is likely to be feasible from a technical perspective, and whether it appears cost-effective from a business perspective. The effort associated with feasibility should be just enough to decide whether further investigation is justified or whether the project should be stopped now if it is likely to be unviable and/or unachievable, prior to full capital expenditure. At such point, projects need to acknowledge what went wrong, why it went wrong and what the organization will do to fix it for future investment proposals. This is important because time and finite capital costs can never be recovered. So learn fast and pivot.

All too often projects speed from the 'why' (desirability) to the 'what' (feasibility) without adequately considering the 'how' (achievability). Creating an organizational environment where project managers can successfully deliver the required outcomes that enable benefits realisation, based on a defensible business case and a case for change, is a project's best chance of success of delivering strategic intent. As Nick Smallwood, IPA Chief Executive Officer, mentioned in his blog, ‘Setting up for success: The Importance of Front-End Loading’: “It has been proven that projects that have focused on front-end loading take time and cost out of a schedule. There is a clear correlation between early stage thinking around the people capabilities a project needs and its eventual successful delivery.”

Like in AgilePM, the aim of building incrementally from firm foundations is to understand the scope of work, how it will be carried out, by whom, when and where. That is, the iterative planning, design and robust preparation for project execution in the early stages of a project's lifecycle to improve the potential for successful project delivery. This is why AgilePM treats predictability as an ongoing process, since all project participants understand and accept that on-time delivery of an acceptable solution is the primary measure of success for a project, regardless of size. Timelines and budgets are repeatedly revisited throughout a project as costs and the date that benefits will start to accrue have a direct impact on project success.

As we all know, the success or failure of a project is often determined in its early investment stages. It is near impossible to turn a project around after full capital investment without incurring sunk costs. Spending more time and money should always be assessed against the revised return on investment in terms of costs, risks and benefits. Of course, successful project initiation takes time, and time is generally in short supply. However, if the right initiation work has been done upfront, then sponsoring organizations and accountable officers can be confident that the preparatory and exploratory work will reveal how to successfully implement and deliver the project.