There’s an old adage that programme slippage is a bit like carbon monoxide poisoning: It’s cumulative, often invisible and there are few warning signs prior to the unconscious drift into the fatal moment. In a programme, the analogy is all of those instances where the small deadlines were missed; a week here, a couple of days there. A partial deliverable with the ‘too hard bit’ to follow later. They all add up, and given that the average lifespan of a programme is over two years, that cumulative effect can be substantial. The average burn-rate that we see on programmes is north of £2M per month, and the average cumulative slippage on a reset engagement is north of 16 months, so there’s a calculable cost of £32M – one very large cost with lots of very small causes.
Many years ago, we evolved a very specific approach to combat slippage. It relies in the first instance on having an executable plan. The programme has to be in a position to know, in detail, what should be delivered, by whom and by when. That kind of planning is not only possible, it’s essential – as many organisations only learn to their cost at the reset. But the plan alone does not prevent slippage. It’s what’s then done with the plan that makes slippage avoidance possible, and as with many things in a programme, it comes done to the right human behaviours.
The first behaviour concerns the task owner. They have to understand that being on a programme team has implications, because there are team mates downstream of them who rely on their outputs to enable the downstream work. That means that the time to report an overdue task is not after the task is overdue, but as soon as they know the task may overrun. Reporting an overdue task after the deadline has passed is as useless as Rowan Atkinson’s famed railway announcement sketch.
The second behaviour concerns the project manager or programme director to whom the potential delay is flagged. Task owners often don’t report task slippage because they fear that hey will simply be told to hurry up, or work extra hours, or may even be bumped from the programme. So the mindset of the project manager or programme director has to be demonstrably different, and it starts with the understanding of their own role. A big part of their job is to clear obstacles; deal with all of the reactive ‘stuff’ that gets in the way of task owners sticking to what’s in the plan. If they can do that, the task owners can remain on plan, rather than bleeding time to the reactive activity that never appeared in the plan (or therefore the budget).
I recently asked a newly appointed programme manager on a reset programme about his approach to risk. His response: “I’ve already been told by the PMO that I need to reinstate the fortnightly risk reviews, but I can tell you now that if somebody brings a risk to me, my first question will be ‘why are you bringing this risk to me, and my second question will be ‘is this really a risk?”
Does that sound to you like the behaviour of someone who will support their team? Someone who will take away the distractions and problems for their team and fix them quietly in the background while task owners concentrate on getting the work done? Me neither.
So what does all this mean for executive sponsors of high stakes programmes?
1.
Your number 1 enemy is slippage.
2.
To control slippage you need a plan and a mechanism for intercepting/tracking slippage.
3.
You need an environment where task owners can call out slippage as soon as it becomes apparent that it will happen, and where they will receive support, not censure.
4.
To create that environment, you need a programme director with the emotional intelligence (EQ) to understand that the hierarchical management pyramid of the programme needs to be inverted. They serve the task owners by flowing the support up to the front line where the work gets done. Their job is to remove the obstacles and keep the team task-focused.