One of my favourite cartoons is of a leader fighting a war with swords and bows and arrows not having time to meet with a salesman who is selling a machine gun because he’s “too busy fighting a war”.

When you’re finding a task or process difficult and then someone suggests a new dimension that you consider beyond what you’re doing now, your reaction is often “that’s extra work” or “I haven’t time to focus on that” or “that’s something we’ll get round to when we’ve mastered the current problems” — ie when we’re more competent and capable in our current processes and tasks.

But what if this new dimension helps to eliminate many of the current problems, makes easier the remaining workload and achieves the true desired results without being either “extra” or an option to be adopted later.

As an analogy, take a product repair department. If a repair department is struggling to cope with the equipment repairs workload and someone suggests a new dimension, namely, componentization, they’re likely to say, “that’s extra and we’ve haven’t got time to focus on that” or “that’s something we’ll get around to when we’ve sorted out the existing workload backlog.”

Yet componentization can make repair easier by replacing it with component replacement (reducing repair workload) and allowing faulty components to be identified leading to an improvement in the quality of components in turn leading to a better quality product and a reduction in the need for repairs. This in turn will also lead to better meeting customer expectations for a good, reliable product with reduced repair needs, costs and time and, potentially, increased sales.

But to move from item repair to componentization requires a different focus, and requires taking action to change how they look at and subsequently construct their products.

This is the same situation with value delivery management.

It requires a different focus and requires taking action to change how you look at, approach, construct and manage projects. But it is not “extra” work or something you should “get around to later”, it is a new approach and way of thinking about projects which makes projects easier, improves the quality of the outcomes and reduces the time and costs involved. It delivers the outcomes and benefits projects are set up to deliver to their customers improving customer satisfaction.

So, when you read about Value Delivery Management don’t think, “We’re too immature to focus on this,” but instead think, “This will actually solve many of the problems we have at the moment enabling us to deliver more projects and more value in less time and for less cost.”

Take the challenge. What do you have to lose except all of the problems you have today with your projects.

Many organizations are wanting to ‘improve how they do projects’ so as to get better results, more consistent results or even some results.

The task is then handed to a special team, IT or a PMO to ‘fix’.

They, understandably, look at how they do projects now and what can be fixed. If they have a project methodology, they’ll replace it with another. If they don’t have a methodology, they’ll get one.

They’ll do more training, more recruiting and more change management – all to ‘improve how they do projects’.

But this is not the right focus or outcome.

The key question for any project delivery capability improvement initiative is, “How does this increase the value delivered through our projects?”. If the improvement team cannot answer this, they have failed.

“We’ve got a better methodology” is not a valid answer unless it can be shown that (a) the former methodology (or lack of one) directly destroyed value and (b) that the new one directly delivers additional value.

“We select better projects” is not a valid answer unless you can actually fully realize the value these ‘better projects’ contain. Blundering forward with the right projects is not a recipe for success (albeit it may waste less money and effort).

At the end of the day the business does not want projects it wants results — new business end states that deliver in full the expected business benefits and value.

In this context, ‘improving how you do projects’ is only relevant in so far as you directly address the drivers of value loss. Having a better methodology that loses value faster is hardly a step forward!

So you need to change your language and focus.

1. Talk of improving “project delivery” (or value delivery) but not project management. The latter is a skill-set, the former is a process. It’s the process you need to focus on.
2. Focus on what drives or destroys project value in your organization. Where and when does the value get lost? How you do ‘work breakdown structures’ is not usually critical to your value delivery success. So what is? Know them and tackle them first. (It may surprise you that we found that the business case is often the single greatest destroyer of value!)
3. Involve senior management early as too much value is lost through poor management decisions, reluctance to challenge management’s desires and ineffective project governance. If they’re not on side, cancel the project.
4. Build a value proposition for the improvement program as early as possible so that you can always show why it is a valuable, viable priority. Otherwise you’ll be cancelled as soon as times get tough.
5. Deliver (and publicise) real benefits early and frequently. You should always aim to demonstrably save 10 times your uplift project’s cost per annum. And as most projects miss, lose or destroy 50% or more of their potential value, this should be easy to achieve.

What do you think?