Lesson 9: Be committed to success, not to being right

Background

Several years ago during one of my times as a consultant, I was placed on a project with an aerospace engineering firm. I was responsible for upgrading a SharePoint implementation from 2007 to 2010, and the project was contracted as a fixed bid, meaning that both scope and cost were fixed. I now know that fixed bid projects are seldom a good idea, and this project was no exception.

Outcomes

Through the course of the “small” project, I learned that the customer expected that certain enhancements would be made to the SharePoint sites during the upgrade. In typical traditional project management fashion, I focused on managing the project through project plans and change control. The customer was less than pleased as the fixed bid project’s timeline kept extending week after week.

Mistakes

I was technically right in that the contract stipulated the terms of our engagement; however, being right and sticking to the contract doesn’t help the customer achieve success in their minds. I made the TCIR/TCIW mistake: The Contract Is Right, The Customer Is Wrong. This is the mistaken belief that strict adherence to the original contract will result in a successfully run project. If your goal is a successfully run project (one where the project execution closely adheres to the original plan), this approach might work; however, customers don’t want a successfully run project. Rather, they want to be happy, or at least satisfied, with the outcomes of the project. Customers couldn’t care less about how closely the plan was followed so long as the results help the customer achieve success.

Agile Reinforcement

There is a key principle from the Agile Manifesto that applies here: “our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.” This is the first principle in the Agile Manifesto and is often the most overlooked. The focus here is on creating valuable (i.e. working) software which satisfies the customer. Interestingly, none of the Agile Manifesto principles talks about predictability or adhering to a plan.

SAFe Reinforcement

From the Scaled Agile Framework, I want to talk about the principle “take an economic view.” At the heart of traditional project management is the idea that we’ve performed the accounting up front. Any deviation from the original plan will result in unexpected costs associated with those deviations. Agile methodologies, on the contrary, implicitly allow for changes and deviations to occur. Instead of trying to perform the cost accounting up front, the cost accounting is done throughout the project. Then, when time or resources become limited later in the project, which is inevitable in every project, economic frameworks such as Weighted Shortest Job First (based on the cost of delay associated with value) are used to find the highest priority work.

Regardless of whether you’re using traditional project management approaches or Agile approaches, most projects will have to cut scope or move deadlines. Agile approaches leverage economic frameworks to make sure that the highest priority work is always done next. And, that just makes good business sense, and dollars.

I hope my struggles and failures can help teach you this important lesson: be committed to success, not to being right.