You've just left the executive team meeting with another new project for your team. This time, you were able to get the management team to realise that some projects with lower priorities will have to be deferred until the new project is complete.
Now, it's time to send out a note to inform the teams that Alpha and Beta projects are on hold until the new Gamma project is complete. There's more than enough work for everyone, so nobody should be concerned about losing her job. You're considering scheduling a kickoff meeting for the new project Gamma before Friday and begin to work on the overall plan for the project.
If you take or consider this approach to dealing with a new project, you're aimed at making a big mistake--with serious and stealthy consequences. The consequences are serious because of the dollar and time impact to your organisation. The consequences are stealthy because it will not be easy to measure the impact with normal management tools and reports. You also have the potential to seriously damage project team motivation and productivity.
Why it's a costly approach
To illustrate the stealthy costs, let's assume it normally takes most people three days to get up to speed on a new project. However, in this example, the organisation does a poor job starting up new projects and deferring existing ones. This has happened too often, and the team members are burned out from too many projects. This time, it takes the team three weeks to get itself organised and productive.
The difference between three days and three weeks is 12 working days. Assume a minimum of six people, at an average total labor cost of US$500 per day. Even though your new project has just started, it's already 12 days late and US$36,000 over budget. Of course, you won't notice the schedule delay until the project is well enough along for a status report, and you may never recoup the US$36,000 in lost productivity.
Most executives need to polish their prioritisation skills. Your staff is always busy, but new projects keep coming along that you have to fit into the schedule. You must do this with the least amount of disruption and lost productivity. Following these steps will help you achieve that goal.
The first step in the right approach
In theory, when a new project lands on your plate, you'll replace some current work with new work that has a higher value to the organisation. That is the obvious and potentially limited viewpoint. But that isn't all a CIO needs to worry about. You have to make sure the team stays motivated and that the process remains stable-making sure the deferred projects are easy to resume at a later date.
Ensuring motivation among team members on the now-deferred projects is actually your major challenge, because:
- Technical contributors like the challenge of solving problems. When you start a project, you're engaging them with a challenging problem. Later, when the project is deferred, you prevent them from completing the solution. That is a very de-motivating scenario.
- If the transition to a new project isn't handled well, it may seem that you deliberately "wasted their time" on the projects that were deferred. No one likes to feel that his time has been wasted.
- If your organisation has a track record of deferring projects, that fact compounds the problem of decreased motivation related to deferred projects.
When nothing is deferred
Note that I'm talking about formally deferring projects. Many organisations don't actually defer projects--they just keep adding new projects with higher priority than the existing projects. In my opinion, this is the worst possible scenario, but one that happens all the time. I'm no longer surprised when a project manager says, "We have 30 people in our IT department, supporting 65 active projects".
When this approach is the norm in a company, employees quickly realise that any assignment is likely to be short-lived. They adapt by not engaging very deeply with the projects. The projects end up taking longer, since no one is working very hard, which increases the probability that the project will be interrupted by a new project, all of which results in a cycle of decreasing motivation.
These three tips will help you keep all projects on track:
- Allow work to continue until a deliverable is complete.
- Try to complete all deliverables in a lifecycle phase, if possible.
- Bring the deferred projects to formal closure.
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