How To Stop Missing Targets: Finding the hidden bottlenecks

Episode #323 How To Stop Missing Targets: Finding the hidden bottlenecks

UNDERWHELMING RESULTS ARE COMMON 

Last week we launched our No Bullshit Leadership Hub, and the community is already firing on all cylinders. For those of you who’ve already joined, you may have answered the initial survey questions, some of which highlighted the common problems that every leader faces.

One comment, which was articulated beautifully by Sarah, really hit home for me. Sarah said, “I think a big leadership challenge right now is capturing and communicating the nuances of what’s slowing down progress as well as utilizing data to set realistic goals.“

This is a great observation, and one that I see many leaders struggling with right now. In this newsletter, I pull this apart a little. What are the root causes of unexpected inertia? How do we work out what’s really happening based on the symptoms that we observe? And how do we communicate and seek adjustments from our stakeholders?

This newsletter is super practical and I know it’s one that you’re going to want to keep coming back to again and again, so you might want to bookmark the post.

I start by digging into the 10 common root causes of slow progress, unexpected delays and missed targets. Then I give you six ideas for how to uncover some of the hidden bottlenecks. And finally, I give you my foolproof, four-step process for communicating any delays, and resetting expectations with your stakeholders – without having them lose confidence in your leadership ability.

THE 10 ROOT CAUSES OF DELAYS AND MISSED TARGETS

To work out what’s slowing progress and causing targets to be missed, you’ve got to go way back to where the work was initiated and step through to where you are now.

I’ve distilled 10 root causes of unexpectedly slow progress, and almost every situation can be attributed to one or more of these.

Root Cause #1: Inaccurate assessment of the deliverable. When work is first approved, whether it’s a project or a business-as-usual initiative, the problem starts with poor definition of the job itself.

Cost and time estimates are frequently underdone… risks are generally downplayed… and the potential benefits case is overblown.

You can pretty much expect this every single time because in the approval phase, the person petitioning for the allocation of resources wants a positive answer. So they want to look at everything through rose-colored glasses… and give you the same set of glasses to look through.

Your very first hurdle is the psychology of selling the investment. This is where expectations are forged, and if the expectations are unrealistic, which is often the case, even acceptable progress and speed will seem slow in comparison.

Root Cause #2: Missing critical touch points. People (or teams) who are, in fact, key to final delivery are often not consulted. For example, a project might require input from risk management… or it might need legal sign-off… or there may be new things that need to be procured and you need to develop a new relationship with suppliers.

When planning is done in isolation by each business unit or team – as it mostly is – they often adopt a myopic view, disregarding the need for input from third-party sources. This builds in bottlenecks right from the start, because at some point these external resources have to be incorporated to get the job done.

Root Cause #3: Weak accountability assignment. Single-point accountability is fundamental to efficient execution. You have to have one head to pat and one ass to kick for everything.

Without clear ownership, people adopt an all-care-no-responsibility approach. This is like a cancer, slowly growing but unseen in your culture. No one really feels the pressure of delivering the overall outcome because the ownership is inherently weak.

When problems arise, instead of the strong sense of urgency that comes with single-point accountability, people just sit back expecting someone else to solve the problem… and you won’t even be able to see this happening.

Root Cause #4: Poor decision-making discipline. This is essentially a byproduct of weak accountability. When it’s not clear who’s making a decision, the only alternative is to try to reach consensus. Many leaders kid themselves that this is a good thing.

It’s not.

Consensus decisions are the worst type of decisions. When you seek consensus, the focus shifts from solving the problem to appeasing the people. You end up with a “Frankenstein’s Monster” solution – a decision that everyone can live with, but no one is really happy with.

It also opens the door to power of veto. Key people can use their power to withhold approval, with no consequence for them personally because they have no real stake in the accountability.

Consensus decision-making and power of veto are both major progress killers.

Root Cause #5: Lack of scope discipline. In project-based work in particular, protecting the scope is critical. Very often, scope is expanded because people are full of good ideas and, with all the best intentions, they add stuff to try to improve the outcomes… but this rarely creates a tangible benefit.

Instead, it does nothing more than to increase time, cost, and complexity. Having poor scope discipline will slowly and invisibly push the timing out, and you’ll just wake up one day to a project that is unrecoverably late.

Root Cause #6: Poor understanding of resource dependencies. We tend to do our planning using averages. For example, we might know that we need 8 FTE in our business analysis team – but in certain specialist areas of expertise, there may be bottlenecks.

Resource leveling is a project management technique that lets you look at the work program through the lens of your resource allocation. You’ll notice if you do this that on some weeks, Analyst A may only have 10 hours of work assigned, while Analyst B has 110 hours assigned.

If you’re not aware of this, you’ll find out eventually, and things will slow down to glacial speed while people twiddle their thumbs waiting for a certain point of the critical path to be reached. As a general rule, it’s important to recognize that a lot of critical information gets lost in the averages.

Root Cause #7: Poor milestone discipline. If you don’t have clearly defined milestones to interrogate as a project progresses, it’s easy to get blindsided by accumulated slippages. This is why establishing frequent milestones, which are assessed diligently, is an essential part of any project-based work.

If you’re not assessing earned value at every milestone, it’s easy to get it wrong. Let me just explain this. Most projects keep pace with their cost estimates – that’s the nature of resource allocation. Some even keep pace with their defined time milestones. But very few keep pace with their earned value expectations.

Earned value is the measure that tells us, given the burn rate of time and money, have we reached the level of functional completion that we expected to up to that same point?

Root Cause #8: Inability to anticipate unforeseen risks. There are so many examples of unforeseen risks blowing up project estimates. One great example that’s in the news at the moment (and, in fact, has been for a number of years) is the ambitious Snowy 2.0 Pumped Hydroelectricity Project in Australia.

What started off as a $2 billion project is now looking like it’s going to cost $30 billion, once you include $12 billion of new transmission infrastructure, and the federal government’s $6 billion buyout of the NSW and Victorian Governments’ shares in the company.

Of course, the project ran into serious issues with its civil earthworks. Who would’ve thought that tunneling through 27 kilometers of unknown geology in a pristine national park would run into problems?

One of the tunnel boring machines – which was named Florence, after my granddaughter – ran into soggy ground, and it remained bogged there for almost a year. As it stands today, the project is going to be delivered at least six years late, and at the very least, at six times greater cost than was originally projected.

… and it’s not all over yet!

Think about this: that’s $30 billion of taxpayers’ money, which is unlikely to get anywhere near an acceptable commercial return. It does, however, demonstrate an important principle of major projects: If I owe you $100, I’ve got a problem; but if I owe you $1 million dollars, you’ve got a problem!

Root Cause #9: Lack of air cover. Many senior managers are weak. I don’t mean that in a disparaging way: I just mean they don’t have the strength to stand their ground when the people above them keep throwing work onto the pile. They just say “yes”, and dutifully pass it down the line, asking their teams to take on more and more with no additional resources.

Something has to give. And normally the outcome is that everything slips. It’s the silent bloating of a work program that’s unavoidable when no one pushes back on their boss.

Root Cause #10: Inability to face the truth. Many leaders simply won’t report accurately, because they don’t want to deliver bad news. They cover up slow progress and slippages with irrational optimism. They say things like, “Well, we may be a little behind, but we’re going to make this up later.”

This is where you need to be brutally honest and direct as a leader. You never make it up later. It doesn’t happen. So tell me exactly what you intend to do to recover that slippage. If this doesn’t involve either a reduction in scope or an addition of resources, then your time delays are only going in one direction –and it’s not a good direction.

SIX TECHNIQUES FOR PREVENTING (AND UNCOVERING) HIDDEN DELAYS

Those 10 root causes will cover just about everything that can go wrong that cause your initiative to slip. I want to give you a few practical actions that you can take, which will enable you to get to these root causes and expose the bottlenecks sooner rather than later.

1. Don’t let questionable stuff through the gate.

Your first, best bet to combat delays is to ensure you create a well-defined work program that recognizes the reality of the environment in which it’s being delivered. Don’t do dumb sh!t, like building in more work than you have the resources to complete… like ignoring or downplaying key risks… like including initiatives that are low value, in relative terms.

2. Inspect outputs diligently.

Create regular milestones and KPIs. If there’s a lot of elapsed time between milestones, find other ways to satisfy yourself that progress is actually on target. Accurate reporting of the things that truly measure progress is critical.

Use earned value measurement for anything that even faintly resembles a project, and be strong with your one-on-one interrogation of the individuals who are accountable for delivery. Be supportive, but also be insistent: “Don’t tell me – show me!”

3. Create clarity of accountabilities. For every single deliverable, you need one head to pat and one arse to kick. This is the key to execution excellence because without single-point accountability, you’ll always find your results are underdone. Once you’re convinced that you’ve put single-point accountability in place, make sure you fully enforce the structure. That means you not dipping down into your accountable people’s work, and it means ensuring that their decision rights aren’t trampled on from either above or beside.
4. Be aware of decision-making inertia. People are typically just too slow in their decision-making. Why? Because they’re afraid of getting it wrong. So they spend too much time in consultation… they wait for data that often does nothing to improve the quality and accuracy of the decision they’re trying to make… and they push their decisions up the line to try and get agreement from people above. It’s their security blanket.
5. Look carefully at reporting to find inconsistencies. If you pay attention to the detail, you’re going to pick up on inconsistencies in reporting. For example, a milestone may have slipped, and it’s been reported with a ‘yellow’ status on this week’s status report. But no change has been made to subsequent deliverables.

Something has to change. The deadline? The budget? The scope? The level of promised quality? The risk profile? Something has got to change.

This is not technically difficult to see, but holding people to account is emotionally difficult. Your job is to not let anyone get away with telling you something that’s implausible.

6. Promote a culture of robust challenge. One of the biggest cultural barriers to keeping things on track is the unwillingness of people to speak up. Your objective should be to create a culture of robust challenge, where people speak their minds, contribute their ideas, and engage in conversations that provide constructive tension.

If you think that a high performing team is one where there is little conflict, you would be mistaken. High performing teams have a significant level of tension, as individuals wrestle with key issues to get the best outcome.

These teams rarely leave problems hidden.

COMMUNICATING DELAYS AND RECALIBRATING EXPECTATIONS

Let’s say you run into one of these inevitable problems that cause causes slow progress, delays and missed targets. Your best protection is early detection, which is why it’s so important to do the things that will expose those delays as soon as possible.

The vast majority of these problems stem from the simple fact that humans are involved, so they are inevitable, no matter how great a leader you are.

I’m going to finish by giving you my foolproof process for communicating delays and recalibrating your stakeholders’ expectations.

The first step is to get all the dead cats on the table. Make sure you know the full extent of the problem. This can be really hard work. As we know, people will often hide bad news. You’ve got to find the root cause and you’ve got to stem the bleeding. So, make sure you don’t take anything on face value.

Challenge every statement with questions about what and why. Your main objective here is to expose the irrational optimism in your team’s recovery plans. You’ve got to force people to face the reality of their situation. Don’t let them off the hook with the standard approach that they’re going to default to, which is, “Well boss, the delay was bad, but now everything is good.“

The second step of the process is to recast the value case and make sure it still makes sense to continue. Very few leaders do this. Once you have a good sense of the impacts, go right back and re-evaluate why you started the work in the first place. Instead of assuming that your organization is going to suck up the additional cost and time of a delay, use it as a review point.

Now that we know the value we’re going to deliver is less than originally anticipated, does it still make sense to continue? There’s no point in putting good money after bad, so always be prepared to walk away from a sunk cost.

The third step in the process is to make real change to recalibrate. If you want a different outcome going forward, then you have to make changes. What are you going to do differently to improve the outcomes?

Some of this might simply be recasting of cost and time parameters but, on other occasions, you’re going to need to replace one or more people who haven’t been able to deliver. Just t be clear though – I’m not suggesting witch hunts and scapegoating. But if you have, let’s say, a project manager who has repeatedly covered up issues, that person is really unlikely to change going forward. If you haven’t got someone you trust? Get someone you can trust.

Now you’ve taken three important steps:

1. You’ve got all the dead cats on the table;
2. You’ve recast the value case; and
3. You’ve made real changes to recalibrate the initiative.

 For the final step of the process, you’re now in a position to communicate to your stakeholders. Here are some important rules of thumb for your disclosure:

The first thing is, don’t sugarcoat it, whatever you do. You don’t want to erode your stakeholders’ trust in you or the process that you are undertaking.

You should also think of this as though you have one shot in the locker. If you have to reset expectations, do it once and only do it once and do it right. Get everything you need in place to make a recommendation about the go-forward position. If you go back to that well more than once, your stakeholders will understandably get the impression that you don’t know what you’re doing.

In addition to this, try to strike the balance between providing certainty, while still giving options. Don’t just assume that the best outcome is to suck up the delay and keep going regardless. Give your stakeholders the information they need, and provide them with options and a recommended decision.

This is going to help you to rip the band-aid off quickly. You get everything on the table… you give your stakeholders the confidence that you know what you are doing… you map a path forward… and, in the very acceptance of the plan, you have recalibrated expectations around your new delivery parameters.

MANAGING THE PINCH POINTS

Let’s face it, even in the best run teams, delays are going to occur. As a leader, your job is to anticipate these delays, investigate them, and navigate the new reality that you are faced with. Nothing will erode your stakeholders’ confidence in you faster than your inability to handle slippages in your work program decisively. 

But if you can get this right, your leadership stock is going to rise rapidly.