The Guggenheim museum in Bilbao is a stunning piece of architecture that plays host to an impressive art collection. It’s a shining jewel in the local economy and identity and even starred in a Bond movie opening sequence. And it very nearly didn’t get built at all because the business case was initially misunderstood.
Our engagements most often begin when a programme has reached crisis point. One of the most important things to understand in that situation is the extent to which the programme has a plan and is executing it. You might think that we assess that by asking for the plan, but there’s a quicker, more reliable way: We just go to one of the regular team meetings, and sit in quietly.
A few years ago I was in Canary Wharf at a casual drinks reception with senior technologists representing the various corporate residents of the Wharf. Part-way through the evening, the conversation turned to their disappointment with their outlay on various technologies, specifically the fact that these technologies hadn’t delivered the transformative change that they had hoped for. So I started to ask a few challenging questions:
One of my formative experiences of this was twelve years ago having just arrived on a programme. I was the seventh person to sit in the hot-seat, and one of my objectives was to ensure that there was never an eighth. Pivotal to that objective was the performance of the SI (Systems Integrator), who by this stage of the programme, was not much loved. The client view of the supplier was that they were drawing out the programme in order to maximise their revenue, and that they therefore had no particular interest in seeing the programme conclude.
Controversial statement: Programmes should be fun. If you’re on a programme, you get to play a front-line role in removing all of the frustrations of your working life; the clunky applications with their long wait times and counter-intuitive interfaces, the arcane processes layered with workaround band-aids, the non-sensical org structures that mean everything takes three times as long.
It’s forever been a mystery to me, but programme steering committees always seem to want to talk about risks instead of issues. Logic would suggest that the thing that is biting the programme’s bum is probably more important than the thing that might, but if risks have a poor cousin, it’s definitely issues. And that’s a real shame for the programme, because risks don’t kill programmes. They become issues and then they do.
In my earlier life, I cut my programme manager teeth within the Big 4, where I learned a very important lesson that stakeholder engagement isn’t just about the who and the why, but also the when. I was working within tax technology. Tax applications are rather like fine wines – they don’t travel well – because of the differences in taxation between different countries.
Being ‘a programme geek’ at social events is rather like being a doctor. Whereas doctors get a constant unsolicited litany of guests’ medical symptoms, programme geeks instead get to hear all about ‘the programme that goes wrong’; the tale of the high-stakes, transformational initiative at work that is taking three times as long, costing three times as much, delivering only a third of what it promised, and more importantly is draining the life-force and good humour out of the organisation.
The test phase of a programme is never a straightforward experience: The complexities of the data, the processes, user permissions, the need for subject matters experts who have day-jobs and the set-up of environments all combine to make it one of the most challenging phases, and it comes usually at a point where time is short, corporate patience is thin and the programme team are tired. None of these things are ingredients for a happy ship. However, there are ways for a programme to make it easier, as an experience with a client three years ago illustrated.
One of the most striking aspects of distressed programmes – the ones that materially overrun and overspend – is the extent to which risk management simply falls into disuse. Right when the programme is at its most reactive, and therefore desperately needs mechanisms to capture and deal with risk effectively, its ability to do so is not just poor, it is demonstrably AWOL. Passive acceptance of risk as a mere occupational hazard has become the order of the day, and the programme is unable even to articulate its cumulative risk exposure.