Don’t let your projects go Hay-wire!

A week on Thursday (22 May) sees the start of the world-famous Hay Festival of Literature and Arts (www.hayfestival.com) which is down the road from me. From its inception in 1987 when it was just an idea discussed around a kitchen table, it grew from a thousand visitors to now an expected quarter of a million visitors…all to a town with a population of 1,500!

Over the 10 days of the festival, there are a staggering 230+ events, talks and shows. On top of organising all of these, there are over 60 sponsors and partnering companies to deal with, as well as numerous suppliers and providers of various facilities, catering and other services. To get an idea of the scale of this, the event programme is a mere 112 pages long – enough to be a book itself.

What started as handful of friends “wanting something to do of an evening” getting together to organise the first event is now a major project management achievement. And with its continual success, the Hay Festival leadership team can sure show the business world a thing or two about how to manage projects.

I came across this fascinating research conducted by the Standish Group in 2001. They analysed over 500 projects and found out that:

• Only 16% of all projects are fully successful; 84% of all projects fail in some way
• 53% were late or over-budget
• 31% were cancelled prior to completion
• Only 61% of promised features and functions are typically delivered
• The average project goes over budget by 189%, some exceed 400%
• On average, a project lasts 222% longer than it was planned to last.

When Standish analysed the reasons for poor performance, they came up with this top 10 list of why these projects failed:

• Lack of User Involvement
• Incomplete Requirements
• Unrealistic Expectations
• Changing Requirements and Specifications
• Lack of, or poor planning
• Lack of Executive Support
• Lack of Resources
• Unclear Objectives
• Unrealistic Timeframes
• New Technology Problems

One of my colleagues has conducted numerous ‘Lessons Learnt Reviews’ for the last 15 years for several Fortune 100 and FTSE 100 companies. He defines a lesson learnt as “an action that should or should not be performed the next time a similar project is run.” To capture these lessons in a facilitated team meeting conducted at the end of a project, he asks, “What could have gone better?” The most frequent responses over the years (in no particular order) were related to:

• Poor planning
• Unclear objectives
• Deficient capture of the customer’s requirements
• Poor and infrequent communications
• Little or no risk analysis
• Infrequent/non-existent team meetings
• Discontinuity of team members
• Non-compliance with procedures

When the project team members were asked, “In one word only, what could have been improved to make the project more perfect?” Have a guess what the most common response was…. yes, ‘communication’.

Starting to see a pattern here?

No matter whether your project is a major international collaborative programme, the world’s biggest book festival or a home DIY project – failure is almost guaranteed if communication is poor. (By the way, if you don’t believe me on the last example, try painting on the wrong shade of white and see how your other half reacts!)

Good communication doesn’t necessarily mean a nicely worded email or a colourful corporate newsletter. As I’m sure you’ve heard so many times, real communication has little to do with the words themselves.

Want to know how to improve how communication skills in your business? Well, just ask the ‘experts in their field’….no, that’s not necessarily me! I’m talking about horses - who are intuitively excellent at picking up non-verbal communications and sub-conscious meaning. www.executivehorsepower.co.uk/why-it-works.html

Give me a call on 01497 820520 to find out how we can help you and your business ensure your projects don’t go haywire.