Model behaviour

A predominant paradigm in project management is to view the process as a three way trade-off between time, cost and quality. In a two-part report, Dr John McManus sees product functionality, cost and time as issues to be traded off in favour of a leadership, stakeholder and risk management (LSR) strategy.

Despite attempts to make project delivery more rigorous, a considerable proportion of delivery effort results in systems that do not meet expectation and fail to meet user expectations.

When analysing project success and failure it is second nature to ascribe cause and effect to events. The idea of causality or the relationship between cause and event is central to many conceptions of theory. When theory is taken to involve explanation and understanding, it is intimately linked to ideas of causation.

Often, to ask for an explanation of an event is to ask for its cause. Similarly, the ability to make predictions from theory can depend on knowledge of causal connections. For example, the knowledge that stakeholder (or user) involvement contributes to the development of successful information systems warrants the inference that if stakeholders are not involved in the development of a particular system then the system is less likely to be successful.

If we consider the inherent complexity of project risk (that is time, cost and quality issues) associated with project delivery it is not too surprising that only one in eight projects will be delivered to time cost and quality. The culture of many organisations is often such that leadership, stakeholder and risk management (PM: LSR) issues are not factored into projects early on and, in many instances, cannot formally be written down for political reasons and are rarely discussed openly at project board or steering group meetings, although they may be discussed at length behind closed doors.

Although our understanding of the importance of project failure has increased, the underlying reasons still remain an issue and a point of contention for both practitioners and academics.

My view is that developing a new model for project management founded on a leadership, stakeholder and risk management framework will lead to a better understanding of the management issues that may contribute to the successful delivery of projects.

The PM: LSR paradigm provides a more exact way of researching and talking about the discipline of management within information systems development. In particular, to what extent does leadership, stakeholder and risk management contribute to the successful delivery of information systems projects? Is the development of information systems a matter of leadership skills and stakeholder management than a task-based activity with its roots in 20th Century Taylorism?

An examination of the literature underlying project management points to the indisputable fact that few projects fail for technical reasons. But what about management processes?

Management principles are implicit in the literature on risk, leadership and stakeholder management and have been discussed on many occasions by the project management community. Although mature processes clearly exist for project management, e.g. planning, budgeting etc; these processes alone are far from enough to cover the complexity and human aspects of many large and unprecedented complex projects subject to multiple stakeholders, resource and ethical constraints.

The basis for developing and evolving future methodologies will require an extension of the discipline that is project management to provide capabilities and understanding in the interrelationships between leadership, stakeholder and risk management. The major challenge is to extend our understanding and capabilities within these domains so that it is possible to address more ambitious, unprecedented project development.

It is argued that project management is still characterised by Prince2 type methodologies and although some of the broader issues associated with project management have led to a wider understanding of the softer issues associated with projects such as leadership and people capability, the broad forms of leadership and stakeholder management have yet to be embraced with any real vigour.

Although individual organisations can achieve improvements in capability, the effectiveness of an independent approach is limited by the need to compete for business, the tendency for price to be a major factor in winning business, and customer understanding and competence.

Project organisational capabilities comprise the capacity consistently to deploy an integrated set of resources (including specialised competencies) to attain specific functional and strategic objectives.

Capabilities are socially complex phenomena that accumulate over time through market and non-market activities and are embedded in the organising principles, routines and resources of the organisation. They tend to be idiosyncratic and firm specific, and as a consequence cannot be easily replicated by competing organisations or by the same firm in different contexts.

Organisations that have strong capability are to some degree protected from poor delivery performance and recurring or expectation failure. A highly capable organisation is one that consistently delivers superior organisational performance and productivity growth.

Many organisations that have strong capability also encourage active involvement and tend to have higher than average leadership capability and levels of stakeholder engagement.

Most debates and discussions in professional journals have centered on improving hard processes such as better technical design, improved requirements engineering, better reuse, better testing etc.

Based on personal research, my opinion is that projects fail (or are challenged) do so because of managerial and organisational issues related to poor decision making, poor risk management, poor leadership and lack of stakeholder involvement.

The management of projects is not an isolated activity; it must be an all-inclusive effort that embraces shared leadership, decision making and risk. There is generally a gap between an existing situation and a desired situation by members of a particular stakeholder group.

Stakeholders are any group of people who share a pool of values that define the desirable features of an information system, and how they should be obtained. Stakeholder groups face significant challenges and problems in either ethical terms or in terms of morality. In the former case, a stakeholders main concern is to mould the future to fit their interests. In the latter case, the main concern is to align the project with the stakeholders current concerns to legitimise commitment.

While acknowledging that formalised project management is a relatively adolescent discipline, with a history covering half a century or less, it would be reasonable to assume the body of knowledge associated with project management is maturing and is being effectively absorbed by professional project managers.

This assertion, however, does not appear to be the case despite advances in project management tools, techniques and methodologies. For those project managers undertaking complex projects, the probability of failure remains very high.

Our understanding of the impact of schedule, cost and quality and the methodological approaches to project failure seem particularly important because of the way in which they relate failure to a social and organisational context.

In my view a failure occurs when disappointment arises as a result of an assessment of an outcome from an activity. The assessment of an outcome as a failure is largely dependent upon the values held by the person making the judgment.

Part two of this feature will appear in the next issue.

Stakeholders hold the key

1. The project manager needs to recognise that stakeholders have different legal, economic and social relationships to a particular project
2. Any stakeholder analysis must generate usable and definable information realising the diversity of interests at play within stakeholder groups
3. Take care to discover the different viewpoints of stakeholders and plan for conflict resolution workshops or other preventative measures
4. The roles that stakeholders play are important. Responsibilities and duties should be established at the planning stage
5. Do not underestimate the power stakeholders have (or acquire) during the life cycle of the project