Page 68 - Straight Talk On Project Management IV

Choosing success metrics: are failing IT projects set up to fail?

I met a friend recently for lunch and, quite frankly, he is
looking amazing! He joined a gym about a year ago and
you can tell! His face is slimmer, he seems to have more
energy, looks about ten years younger and, he told me,
he has had to buy some new trousers because his old
ones were starting to look like “clown pants”.
He should have been buzzing but instead told me how,
not only had he not lost weight this month, he’d
actually gained a little and so was really cross with
himself!

As he raised his hand to ask for the bill I couldn’t help
noticing how big his biceps were!!! I couldn’t help
thinking that any weight he had put on must be muscle!

This weight gain though wasn’t the only reason why he was beating himself up. That morning, at
work he had had a mauling from his Sales Director because he wasn’t hitting his targets. In fact, no-
one in his team was anywhere near target and across his industry as a whole, sales were down both
quarter on quarter and year on year.
And then, after delivering this gloomy summary of his work life he told me that his accounts had
actually brought in more money than the last quarter and his figures were up year on year too. In
fact, he’d already beaten his sales for the last 12 months in just nine months of this year.

Wait! What!! He was bucking the industry trend; he was outperforming his colleagues and his
competitors, and he had brought in more money than last year already! AND he’d had to sit in a
meeting where his boss told him that this made him a failure???

So, what’s this got to do with IT Project Management?

It’s all about choosing the right metrics for success.

Let’s reframe both of these stories.

Needing new trousers because he’d lost inches around his waist, bulging biceps, looking ten years
younger, having more energy, a slimmer face … these sound like success to me, but because he was
measuring his weight, he felt he was failing. Even using that metric, the data is subjective, muscle
weighs more than fat so, given the other evidence, a few pounds gained is a success!

Then at work, he’s overperforming in a down market. He’s achieving greater results than last year, in
a shorter time and, taking his quarter on quarter results as a yardstick, he is trending in an upward
direction. Again, this all sounds like success in my book. However, because his sales director set
arbitrarily high targets, he and his colleagues feel like failures when they should be popping
champagne corks.

And WE do it all the time in IT Project Management.