The fine art to make impossible what is possible. (Or why many projects fail)

I know there is always a great distance between reality and management, Sometimes it happens to me to bump into a real good manager, but it is mostly an exception to the general rule than the norm.

I would say that my personal opinion is that because nowadays management mostly is all but dealing with reality, with the prevalent culture that has moved from production to finance, we moved from the real economy to a virtual representation that does not take into account many factors because focused only on few parameters. The result is quite interesting since, from one side, finance makes wide use of mathematics and “science” to determine the erratic behavior of users consumers, and at the same time, in terms of management, tend to consider the users (employees, consumers, partners, human beings in general) statistic anomalies to get rid of somehow.

But somehow, we have to face it every day, and therefore I am still wondering how to survive this dichotomy.

I don’t want to say this is a personal problem related to one specific person’s bad behavior; it is more a cultural corporate issue, the distance between what “it is” and what we think “is every day greater.

I experienced myself how even in front of a reality check, there is little chance to change manager’s vision of reality (they sometimes live in a sort of Diminished Reality?); like shreds of evidence slip out of sight in front of very solid, and mandatory (opportunistic? cultural?) corporate internal beliefs.

Alas, this distorted vision of what is actually the environment is at the basis of many company activities: from setting user personal goals to transformational projects or even business projections.

This shortens sight can spread across many different goals; that is set up to be reasonable in the designer’s mind and absolutely foolish in the hands of the ones called to accomplish them.

And when the reality check comes to show this is not possible (usually at the end of the goal, besides any claim done during the path), the classical answer from the goal designer (i.e., the enlighten manager) is generally that:

it would be best if you tried harder (you can’t pretend everything is set up for you, some personal, yours, sacrifice are inevitable)
it would be best if you pushed more (to justify when they do not care about you until it is too late),
is up to you to find a solution (a variant of the genial statement: I want solutions, not problems)
it would be best if you had told us before (a variant of the push more, where it is not even recognized you told it)
…

Of course, nothing as reminding that

if there are no resources in place the things can’t be done,
if there are not figure to push (or systematically denied access to those resources) is not possible to push,
if the proposed solutions are rejected as not viable because it would state a lack of resources that is not acceptable,

could make you gain the terms of eternal compliant guy (nemo propheta in patria).

“If all complain like you do and do nothing, at this time the company where will be?”

Well, I would object that sometimes what you call complain is just the description of the resources needed to perform what has been required, but this is obviously not the vision of most of the managers who have their own interpretation of resources and how to use them.

“There are problems, but is up to you to overcome that, a little sacrifice have to be done”

Well, let me say something unpleasant, some tasks cannot be done even if you put them in the PBC, KPI, Business Plan, or whatever, and most of the time, the reason is the company itself.

How can I say this? well, I can summon just more than 30 years of experience in the IT world, to name an example, lol 🙂

But there are solid facts behind all this, and those facts are why they fail to accomplish tasks or go down to a project.

So let me try to remind myself how a task can be fulfilled with some basic project management knowledge that (hopefully) even high-level managers (take the irony here) should have.

A task (o goal) is something that should bring us from the status “A” to the status “B”

This path can be performed through actions that transform things from “A” to “B”.

It does not actually matter if we are talking about how to make one billion dollars from scratch or to fulfill a KPI task; things go more or less always the same here,

Those actions are usually what you put in a Gantt chart,

The chart aims to design a temporal line with owners and resources and the relationships (at least from a temporal point of view) between all that.

The Gantt is a great tool (although not the only one) to understand if what you are thinking makes sense. As a tool, it should be useful for those who deal with “normal” projects and the guy designing the company strategy to raise incomes or market penetration. This is a transformation and, therefore, can be resolved in a project that shapes the process.

Here comes the pain

To do this path, we should know the initial status “A”, the final status “B”, the resources, time, and steps involved in the process to the best of our knowledge.

Now the first problems come from the definition of the initial status “A”.

If you do not have a clear understanding (or are in open denial, as I saw so many times) of the initial status, every effort could be vain because it will be reflected on the possibility of performing the steps required. A fail to design the status “A” will Impact the complete process making it harder, if not possible, to reach the required status “B”.

The problem in designing the situation “A” is intrinsically related to how much information you can gather, your experience, and the nature itself of “A”. This information gathering requires to be able to design a real environment, and not the virtual one usually presented.

Who is in charge of what, how to reach him-her-it, what is the level of commitment, what is the relationships between stakeholders, what are the political constraints are just a few of the thousands of questions that should be clarified, political issues are way more important if the task involves a process from “A” to “B” inside a company crossing different units.

Alas, the level of information officially provided is, usually, the least valid since what is presented seldom is what you actually have in place, but it is a composition of the managers and stakeholders’ vision, what they believe is the truth, what it is their interest at that moment.

Let’s take, as an example, who is in charge of something.

Who is in charge?

It seems easy, but this is one of the most difficult questions inside a company. There are real and virtual owners of a task. Most of the time, who have to deal with the task itself is not the owner but work on instructions given by someone who, possibly, is the owner.

Now the problem to understand who is in charge of something is dealing with a subtle political issue: power. Identify the owner can sometimes drive a “political” problem regarding the balance of powers inside the company. As a result, this information is blurry and not easy to obtain.

The underline alternative is to look for a friendly answer from someone who knows; this not means reaching the owner but at least having some info; the problem is how much that info adheres to reality.

Commitment

It is even more difficult to evaluate its commitment if it is difficult to find an owner for a task. To ask someone to commit to a project require being able to be influential.

This is not always possible for several reasons: hierarchy, different groups, political issues….

We can either ask for collaboration or order for collaboration, but we are not sure we will have the collaboration needed in both cases. Commitment comes from understanding the need, but when it is not possible to reach out to the stakeholders, it is clear this commitment is hard to obtain.

In specific corporate environments, it can even be a problem the communication channel; an informal communication channel sometimes has to be overlapped to the formal one. The kind of info that can be passed through those channels is not always the same.

To be clear, has it ever happened to you that to a formal request, you received two answers: one official that states “ X” and a second, “by talking as a friend”, that informs you that the actual situation is “Y”?

All that makes it really hard to draw a clear design of situation “A” for at least two reasons:

You do not have a clear vision of the situation of “A” because the information gathering constrains
You can not report the actual status of “A” because it would not be accepted since it is different from the virtual status presented.

So at the moment, my task is starting to become interesting, I can’t have an exact design of the status of “A”.

Well, let’s go to the second step, defining the status “B”

Understanding the status of “B” is somehow tied to the same constraints related to the status of “A”. Moreover, its definition is often blurry because any transformation, per se, is highly slowed by the company infrastructure for thousands of reasons.

Usually, “B” comes out from a bad compromise between what should be actually done and what it is allowed to do without hurting any political stakeholder inside the company (be it the CEO, CFO, President, BU leader, or whatever).

Again, defining “B” becomes hard because of the same difficult reason that makes it hard to define “A” plus the future uncertainty.

So this is the reason why, to make an example, budgets for the new years are designed to fulfill requests from stakeholders (investors, managers, or whatever) and seldom based on the real market status. This is not a problem when the economy is in expansion, but when we are in a time of crisis….. but how many times I’ve heard:

we have to do at least x% increase this year no matter what

Of course, with the same resources and process in place.

In literature, usually, all those aspects are not present, and a quite naïve way of a deal with this is to say that the company and its managers are focused on the superior wellness of the company itself, acting in a semi-perfect way.

Alas, this is just theoretical, the truth is always different, and different leverages move all company players due to different cultural, historical, material interests.

But turn back to my problem.

I have to move from A to B, and I have no clear vision of the starting “A” point and the arriving “B” point.

Now comes the interesting part: to design the process, I would need to determine the resource in need.

Dealing with resources is not always so easy. The resources can be present or not be present, and even if present, the resources should be available, which is another aspect.

Dealing with resources will affect the time and the cost of the operation. As a matter of fact, any project depends on 3 main dimensions once determined the goals: time, resources, and costs.

Those 3 dimensions that determine the project are not unrelated but are connected to another and tied to the transformation we have to do.

Those links are usually depicted in a triangle that ties together, where each triangle’s area gives the indication of “quantity” each dimension requires.

Now since we haven’t been able to exactly define the goals (due to the indeterminate status of “A” and “B”) we are facing a serious problem to define the relevant dimensions.

Resources to be used in a project should be available for a certain amount (quantity and time). Some fully dedicated, some partially. If those resources come from an external group, the utilization is subject to negotiations between the project’s sponsors and the resources’ owners in a clear, measurable manner.

But due to the blurry environment previously depicted, this is not always the case. The result is that some resources are only “virtually” assigned, and we should rely on their goodwill or the all to be confirmed theory that “all work for the greater good…”

Costs bring us a new level of uncertainty since they are related to a multitude of facts: there are costs tied to a specific task, other that can be related to the necessity to use external resources, sometimes those costs are hidden and not of easy evaluation (as for the determination of the status of point “A” and “B” and the available resources).

Clearly, the interdependence between the various dimensions shows us that modifying one dimension impact the other two. Still, some levels can’t be freely modified because they depend, as an example, on specific needs that are external to the control of the project; this could involve anything, resources, timelines, and costs.

As an example, typically, the real resources available are less than the virtual offered, so the real situation evolves in:

This means an increase in time and costs.

For the previously mentioned reasons that make all blurry, this situation requires accepting higher costs or a longer time-frame. Usually, this is denied because it would be like admitting there have been some problems in the information-gathering phase.

And of course, stakeholders, sponsors, and real external constrain can say this is not feasible.

So the result is even with fewer resources and a timeline that can’t be changed.

Alas, lowering the timeline would increase the costs, but here comes a manager trick….

It’s a kind of magic

The situation described would indicate a dramatic increase in costs. Still, the blurry situation we depicted before makes it possible to consider some of those costs as “virtual” demanding them to other instances or not controllable items.

As in the use of marketing funds to cover some activities and so on, of course, without approval or consensus of Marketing and in front of historical examples that tell this is not a viable solution, funds can be virtually reallocated to cover “temporary” resource issues.

Basically, the result is a situation that depicts a “hole” in the costs area to cover the situation’s reality.

In this case, the best solution would be to cancel the project or redefines the goals, but this is not a politically acceptable viable solution (the blame would be on the higher level), so the result is to design a project with not enough resources, commitment, and economic coverage.

We can design analogous situations on Internal resources and costs, where Virtual entities are usually well-known guests.

Doomed to fail

Of course, this will fail, but this is not the point; the failure is on the task owner, while the manager typically will blame him for not having worked enough.

From a political point of view, there is a great difference between not starting a project or making it fail on the way. In the first case, the responsibility is tied to the stakeholders and sponsors; in the second, the blame will be given to the project team who could not perform. So it is understandable why the second solution is the preferred one.

The nice part is that even knowing all this often, it is not possible nor to object nor to decline to work, lead, take in charge of the task or project, and sometimes this will be used as