Size does matter, but it's not always a good thing.

Category: Daniel Hinderink

By: Daniel Hinderink

Why large organisations are doing a bad job so often. And how to survive external project management while servicing them.

This comparatively tiny chunk of ice sunk the Titanic,
which was too large to maneuver out of it's way.

Many people in large organisations commission large vendors, because they believe they will do a better job. As a consultant I have been watching this behaviour - and seen projects go awry because of it. Here is what I think are the reasons:

1. Project Size

Some project have some bigger sibblings in the neighborhood, which cost much more. In terms of impact and reach, your project might be still much bigger, but since it costs less, it is not perceived as valuable. Many people actually believe they get what they pay for. Often nobody makes the effort to get the value of the project straight that might differ greatly from the price tag.

2. Vendor Size

The company that is hired to do the implementation is possibly one of the biggest software companies globally. Nobody can imagine that they would not have enough ressources, skllls or time to get the job done. They still don't meet a single deadline. In fact they can fail each one of them by at least three months and will be running out of ressources. This is a problem I have run into many times, not just once with very large companies, but very often with them.

3. Lack of project culture on the client's side

Although the client has many managers, they might not operate their business thinking of it as an array of projects. Their means might be almost limitless, they have no time pressure and they are made to believe they are a very well operated organisation.

In other words: they have absolutely no problem-awareness, even if the project is blinking red and blowing steam. Projects are also not reviewed after completion and managers are not benchmarked accordingly.

4. Lack of competition

Since the client has no competition, the people involved have no idea whether they are actually good or bad performers in comparsion with others. This often happens also in very large organisations, like software vendors: all the ambition of it's employees and all the awareness for competiton is directed at their personal carreer <strog>within the organisation, not really their companies performance in comparison with others. In both cases the loser is the project.

5. built-in intertia spiral

Big companies seem to draw a certain type of security-seeking employees. When they've got hold of them, they start to overload them with internal details, standards, procedures and soft facts that all add up to some level of absurdity. Once an employee has managed to understand and operate in that environment, that person becomes another brick in the wall and another force of resistance to change.

Everything that person does is to at least 60 % done to stabilize the situation, which leaves a maximum of 40% to foster change. That includes and is often consumed by self-promotion, which favours looking good (or not bad) over doing something, which potentially runs the risk of failure.

OK. So what to do about it? Here is what I would do differently:

1. out-Size or die

Make sure your project never runs within the lower half of thr budget range. Either add in future cost, or savings from replacing legacy systems or proecdures - or both. Just make sure you haven't got the cheapest steed in the stable and some WOW-factors on your side.

2. Don't go beyond #2.

Never- and I mean never- commission the market leader unless you absolutely have to. Their ambition for your goal is probably less than that of their challengers.

3. Make them feel the pain.

Visualize project delays as extremely expensive for everybody involved as they really are. Define exit points and actually do exit, if efficiency falls below a certain target range. It is important to be able to stop projects if they are in for a wreckage. Make sure you have that power.

4. Don't become the scape-goat

Don't lend yourself as a consultant to be misused as an excuse for underachieving projects. Don't protect anyone from objective comparison, but use as much comparative analysis as you can possilbly gather. There is always competition, sometimes people just need to be pointed at it.

5. Don't stop short of the CEO

I've written it before in this blog: if your information architecture project has no stewardship from top ranks, it is doomed to fail. Information that matters touches on all parts of the organisation and software systems that matter change processes and jobs. Your inside contact needs enough Karma for changing the organisation as a system within a certain scope, or your project will not improve things substantially. If that isn't your client's goal, the project is not worth your time anyway.

I'll try all of this and let you know if it works better next time :-) Anyway, don't despair, there are leading companies that work well and are great clients. It is all about finding them and winning them as clients.