How to increase your project success rate
The exact failure rate of projects is difficult to capture, but studies place it somewhere between 40 and 70%. The UCT Graduate School of Business (GSB) offers some ideas about how you can up your projects’ success rates.
Dennis Comninos, programme director of the UCT GSB’s strategic project management programme, says that to make your projects successful starts with taking a strategic approach to project management.
“Strategic project management has taken centre stage in today’s turbulent and complex environment. It is a core skill for senior, portfolio, project and programme managers,” he says.
According to Comninos, successful projects revolve around four distinct components: Choosing the right project, having the right organisational support, defining goals well, and executing everything smoothly.
“Traditional project management tends to focus on planning and execution,” he says. “Strategic project management broadens this to focus on project selection and gathering full organisational support. This approach integrates processes, tools, technology, people and organisational culture to succeed. It takes the holistic view of an organisation’s resources and its goals.”
The aim of strategic project management is to ensure that resources allocated to a specific project are put to the most efficient use and that every step in the project processes is executed in a way that has a lasting impact on the organisation. Project managers can achieve this by focusing on three key principles:
1. Capturing real-time knowledge and sharing it across the enterprise;
2. Streamlining communication for improved collaboration; and
3. Minimising waste to save on resources.
1. Capturing real-time knowledge and sharing it across the enterprise
“Being able to identify and capture knowledge more effectively, including channelling organisational wisdom, is at the heart of all project success,” says Comninos.
Research by University of Cape Town (UCT) research student, Terry van Graan, shows that capturing and sharing the right knowledge is critical in today’s business environment, which is characterised by increasingly complex operational challenges, more geographically dispersed teams, more data, information and technology, and a haemorrhaging of experienced practitioners across sectors.
“Knowledge, and indeed wisdom, can be used to reduce project time, reduce costs, improve quality and customer satisfaction, and minimise the need for reinventing the wheel,” says Van Graan.
Van Graan shows that only 20% of an organisation’s knowledge is explicit, in the forms of documents, procedures, processes and databases. The other 80% is tacit, in the form of undocumented, unshared, untapped know-how. To be effective, organisations have to find ways to leverage the tacit knowledge that exists in the minds of the professionals who experience the projects first hand and convert their knowledge into easily accessible, explicit knowledge that can be used to guide future projects.
“It is about capturing what we learn today for what we’ll be doing tomorrow,” says Comninos.
2. Streamlining communication for improved collaboration
One of the indicators that organisations are not capturing and using knowledge effectively is the radical growth in corporate e-mails. A recent report by technology market research firm, The Radicati Group Incorporated, shows that in 2009 the typical corporate user sent and received 167 messages per day. This is expected to grow to 219 messages per day this year.
A far more effective use of technology to improve communication and knowledge flow is social media. A McKinsey Global Institute study shows that for 4 200 major companies, social media unlocked US$1.3 trillion dollars (about R11 trillion), two-thirds of which is because of improved communication and collaboration.
“Making it easier for teams inside and outside of the organisation to communicate with each other makes collaboration seamless and reduces losses in productivity and time,” says Comninos.
3. Minimising waste to save on resources
The principle of reducing waste applies to areas other than time. A notorious example of how reducing the use of electricity, for example, translates into monetary gain is that of IBM saving US$442 million (approximately R4 billion) by reducing their energy use between 1990 and 2011. By applying smart technology and smart building approaches, the company could use energy in ways that were efficient and had the most impact for any project on any given day.
According to sustainability consultant and CEO of Cape Town-based consultancy Innov8-Africa, Anthony Nartey, up to 50% of energy and water used in buildings is wasted on average. And, he says, taking a smarter approach to energy use can save an organisation as much as 40% on energy costs, 50% on water, and up to 30% on building maintenance.
“Reducing waste across the organisation saves money that can be used to finance more projects or improve support for current ones,” says Comninos.
It is only by taking this strategic approach that project managers will be able to manage projects effectively that add the most strategic value to their organisations, says Comninos. And having the right knowledge, seamless communication channels, and the ability to cut down on waste, improves decision-making, team design, organisational support and project selection in the future, all of which will help in keeping project failures to a minimum.
