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A great project has a purpose that resonates and energises.   They are exciting to work on.  They provide an opportunity to make difference.  A difference to an organisation, its customers, a community and quite possibly to all of society. 

Projects also provide an opportunity for the people working on them to grow and develop new skills, relationships and awareness that can help propel their careers.  As the saying goes: “we develop the most when we play on the edge of what’s possible”.  

Here’s the rub though: what makes a project exciting is also what can cause distress – uncertainty and risk.   Learning the art of how to balance the pursuit of great results and manage the risk of disappointment will make you excel at delivering projects.

There’s a lot you can do to de-risk a project before it starts including: developing clear and compelling plans, having measures of success that are achievable and greater than the cost of the project, selecting the right team and approach, having budgets that sufficiently account for risk and programs that drive efficiency in managing time. 

But with all things that carry risk, there’s a chance it may not go to plan.  And the best time to fix a project if it does go off track is always as early as possible, as the problems will be smaller and you’ll have more time for solutions to work. 

So, looking for early warning signs a project may be headed for trouble and knowing what to do about them is something that will help you excel at delivering your projects.

In this article I provide four early warning signs I look for on my projects and provide actions you can take if you see them on your projects.

1. Results Drift

Projects are meant to make things better.  Delivering results is why they exist.  However, its easy for project teams to become caught up in doingrather than achieving.  Don’t get me wrong, doing the work is vital to projects succeeding. 

My point here is an early warning sign your project may be headed for trouble is when you start to observe the focus of the project team is primarily on activities such as completing tasks and managing costs and time and drifts away from how these activities are or are not getting the team closer to achieving intended results. 

Why this matters is because where the focus on doing over achieving persists, it can cause a team to drift off course and lose sight of delivering results without realising it.  It’s like when you become lost in conversation talking to passengers in your car on a road trip and mindlessly miss a turn off.  Before you know it, you’re miles away from your intended destination and running late.   

Being focused on results first and how the project is progressing to achieve them will help keep your project on the right path.

What you can do where you see Results Drift:

• Link project team member responsibilities and outcomes to the results of the project.  Make clear how their contributions will help deliver to the overall result.

• Start project meetings with the results the project is there to achieve.  Don’t just do this at the beginning of the project.  Ask team members how their contributions are tracking to support achieving the projects results.

• Celebrate milestones and team member contributions with a focus on how it has helped bring the project closer to achieving its target results. 

2. Scope Extortion

Projects typically start with a clear set of outcomes they will achieve and what will be included and excluded.  This is referred to as the projects’ scope.  Experienced project leaders know that one of the main challenges to getting projects done and achieving results is having to include additional deliverables or results while the project is underway. 

In workplace projects, a common source of additional scope is other stakeholders.   Where a project impacts multiple parts of an organisation, stakeholder groups that will be impacted may ask for ‘changes’ and ‘modifications’ to the project to meet their specific needs.  What often starts out as a ‘request’ can become a ‘condition’ of their support. 

This happens often in technology implementations where stakeholders seek to minimise changes in what they have to do by altering the functionality of new software they will be using to more reflect existing ways of working.   In some cases, these changes are totally fine and can be absorbed by a project.  But often they are not.

Customisation of software particularly if it’s an ERP system is expensive to start with and increases lifecycle costs and difficultly to maintain.    The same can happen for other workplace changes such as office relocations and fitouts.

Where you start getting multiple ‘requests’ for scope changes from people being impacted by a project in return for supporting it, it’s an early warning sign that your project could be headed for trouble.

What you can do if you spot signs of Scope Extortion:

• Establish a change request process that requires a business case to be prepared to proceed. Make sure it considers project inputs of cost and time vs impact on benefits with delegations in place to enable swift decisions.

• Make sure project communications talk about project benefits and how requests for change will be considered and must pass business case tests to be approved. 

• Identify ‘no-change’ zones where you will not entertain any changes as they place too much strain on achieving project outcomes.  Acknowledge there will be challenges in adapting to change and support will be provided to help overcome them.  

3. Stalling Momentum

Momentum is a powerful thing.  In physics, momentum = mass x velocity.  The amazing thing about momentum is the faster an object moves, the harder it is to stop. 

Consider this:  just one brick can stop a train from beginning its journey down the tracks.  But once a train has gained momentum, it can crash through an entire brick wall.  The same is true for projects.

Accomplishing project tasks (gaining ‘mass’) in a quick and efficient manner (gaining ‘velocity’) can create energy and momentum for your project that can help break through the toughest challenges and deliver the results you need.  Developing this type of force makes delivering projects much easier.

An early sign that a project is heading for trouble is where momentum starts to stall.  It’s often rooted in individual accountability lapses. It usually starts with one team member starting to slip in completing their actions with no corrective action taken to keep the project progressing at the pace needed.

This type of behaviour provides a signal to the rest of the team that its OK not to keep going at the pace required and momentum starts to stall.  Where this happens, it makes achieving project results much harder.

What you can do where you see Momentum Stalling:

• Reestablish a sense of collective accountability with your team.  Seth Godin in his book The Song of Significance shows how a hive of bees works together in unison to create a new bee hive.  Their survival depends on each bee doing what is needed of them within three days to create a new hive.  A project needs a team to work together to succeed. 

• Use sprints or collaboration sessions to rebuild energy and progress.

• Schedule sponsor engagement and input to recreate a sense of urgency and importance to get the project done and what it will mean to the organisation

• Change team members if their desire or availability is holding them back and can’t be fixed.

4. Runway Gap

Running into cost pressure on a project is one of the most common challenges to overcome.  Projects often focus on the cost ‘burn rate’ which is how much of the budget is being incurred or ‘burned’ over a specific period of time.  It is a metric used to monitor and assess the speed at which a project's budget is being consumed.   It’s often shown as a cost per week or month.   Like a speedometer shows how fast you are travelling in a vehicle.

What the cost burn rate on a project doesn’t show however, is how long the budget will last at the current burn rate and whether there is a time gap to completion based on the current rate of spend.   Some cars calculate the km’s that can be travelled based on fuel or charge remaining and past average speeds.  This helps you know if you can reach your destination with the remaining fuel or charge.  

On projects this type of measure is called a Runway Gap.  It measures the amount of time you have left in your budget compared to the amount of time you need to complete it.  Where a shortfall starts to show it gives you an early warning your project may have cost pressures to complete.

What you can do if you see a cost Runway Gap start to emerge:

• Evaluate your options:  how to reduce costs, shift costs, accelerate progress, reduce scope or increase budget.  Compare how these options impact overall project results.  What is the best option comparing cost, time, scope vs results?  

• Show some vulnerability by asking for help.  We often make the mistake of thinking we need to solve all problems ourselves.  Speak with your project sponsor and provide options and what you are thinking and get their input into how to solve the problem.

Recognising early warning signs that your project might be headed for trouble, including results drift, scope extortion, stalling momentum and runway gap gives you the gift of time to take action to steer it towards success.

If you’d like more project execution tips, check out our free resources.

thinkcleargroup specialises in helping people in corporate functions excel at getting projects done.  If you’d like to learn more about what we do check out our services or book a free discovery call.