Treat Projects as Business Targets

When we’re heads down in the middle of a project, it’s often easy to focus on staying on task, on budget, and on scope – and all too easy to lose track of the original business proposition. Truth is, all projects start with a business value proposition in mind. This is what I like to call the business target.

A while ago, as an exercise in a project management class I was teaching, I asked each of the PMs to tell us the purpose of their project. The first PM said “to upgrade the payroll system”. Oops – that’s not much of a purpose. Why would we want to spend lots of dollars just to upgrade a payroll system? Turns out there were new tax rules coming in that the old system couldn’t handle. So – the real purpose of the project was to enable compliance with new tax regulations. Obviously, if this could be done with a few minor tweaks, that would be better than a full upgrade. Given it could not, the upgrade was on.

My point , however, is that even the PM lost sight of the business target in the middle of the project. What a PM really needs is a laser focus on this target. There are several benefits to a well thought out and clarified business target.

First, it’s easier to reign in scope creep. If we need taxes to be right come January 1, but HR wants to add some new vacation tracking functionality, it’s easier to say no – especially if that might endanger the Jan 1 date.

Second, the odds of success are much higher. Back in my programming days, I remember a project where we did a great job of defining requirements, and even added mock screen-shots and reports to the specs. The customer signed off on the spec, we delivered on-time and on-budget, only to hear “it’s exactly what I ordered, but not what I need!” Ever heard that one?

By focusing on the business proposition it’s easier to work with the customer along the way and even make suggestions that would better enable the project to deliver against the proposition. This may require some course adjustments. In the case above, we would have changed the design for a smoother work-flow, rather than sticking to the original specs. These adjustments may well have caused the project to be both late and over budget. But isn’t a little late and over budget better than delivering something useless that happens to meet the original requirements?

One project manager I spoke to recently put this idea quite succinctly. He was taught that for any project, he should be able to give the “elevator pitch” for the project. An elevator pitch is a sales term, and every salesperson can give you that 15-30 second pitch for why you should buy their product. If you can successfully give a 30-second elevator pitch for your project, you’ll be well on the way to a truly successful project with happy stakeholders.

Now, viewing projects as business outcomes has some serious implications for how portfolios are managed. More on that in my next post . . .