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.

This is typically where the analogy departs momentarily though, because whereas doctors hear about current symptoms, programme geeks get the retrospective account: It’s all already happened.  But what stops the programme patient in their tracks is when you ask “when did you first realise it was going wrong?”

There’s a point to the question: Calling out a programme after it’s all gone wrong is easy, and largely useless: It’s too damn late.  The damage is already done.  The real art lies in spotting the emerging picture and calling it out while there is still time to act and avoid the damage.  That’s much more difficult to do, but it is possible.  As with the medical profession, it just comes down to knowing where to look, how to interpret what you find there, and being able to assemble a composite conclusion from an accumulation of emerging symptoms.

‘Cumulative’ is the operative concept.  Like humans, programmes are complex beasts, so no single symptom will ever hold the clue as to what is about to unleash itself on the body corporate.  Knee problems cause back pain, so don’t just look at the back.  For programmes, there are eight core areas of the anatomy to consider.  Detailed articles to follow, but for the time impoverished, here are the headlines:

The first area is rather obvious, but paradoxically, rather difficult to see; the basic facts of time, budget and scope: What was going to be delivered, by when and for how much money?  What you’re really looking for is specific data points that allow a trajectory to be charted.  Often though, the picture is somewhat foggy, because the lack of clarity around scope, cost and timeframe is a contributing factor to the problem.  Be prepared to step outside of the programme’s own reporting: For example, there is usually someone in the CFO’s world who can provide a solid response on budget allocation, and the FY container can be very useful in demonstrating a timeframe.  Fog in the scope statement can often be cleared by cross referencing with the business requirements, any RFPs that were issued to suppliers, and even other projects that were cancelled because their scope overlapped with the programme.

The second area is the leadership of the programme.  Programmes that go spectacularly wrong have almost always experienced multiple changes in leadership, particularly in the hot-seat (the programme director) and the executive sponsor (sometimes referred to as the ‘SRO’) roles.  I was once the seventh programme manager in the hot-seat – no, there wasn’t an eighth – and I learned a lot just from understanding who had preceded me, when, and why they left, but if the organisation had been more introspective after the third change of leadership, my guess is that a seventh programme manager might not have been necessary. It was a very telling early symptom and it was missed.

The third area gets a little more forensic, as it concerns plans.  The key question to ask is what did happen as opposed to what was supposed to happen, and why the gap between the two?  The simplistic response will often be ‘because the plan was unrealistic’, but dig deeper and you’ll often find that even if a more realistic plan had been produced at the time, it still wouldn’t have been deliverable for a whole host of reasons.  Those nuggets can be vital to the early recovery actions, so never stop at a diagnosis of ‘unrealistic plan’.

The fourth is the overall health of the programme’s risk and issue management.  For everything that’s known or knowable, there’s the plan.  For everything else, the programme is entirely dependent on the quality of its risk and issue management – ‘R&I’ for short.  What happens in a failing programme is that the R&I has to compensate for the reactive nature of the programme and is ultimately stretched way beyond its elastic limit. There are numerous ways to assess R&I (article to follow), but you could go and look where no-one ever looks – at the closed risks.  What you’ll often find is that they were closed not because they were dealt with, but rather because circumstances had changed: In other words, the risks morphed into something much bigger before they were ever dealt with.  This is a really useful early warning sign that things are going awry.

The fifth area is related to R&I, but is specific to its overall trajectory.  One of the biggest red herrings in R&I is the fabled ‘top 5’; the curious notion that by focusing on the top 5 risks and issues amongst hundreds, governance is somehow effectively discharging its duties.  Programmes have literally hundreds of risks and issues, and it’s seldom the case that any one of those will prove terminal on its own.  It’s the accumulation of risks and issues that matter.  I once had a client whose programme portfolio budget increased from £5Bn to £15Bn in 18 months, but their R&I management was so poor initially that they were unable to understand whether their risk exposure had increased proportionally or exponentially.  It was actually the latter, but with a greater (and different) focus on risk and issue management they were able to drive down the exposure once they understood the real situation.

The sixth area is resourcing.  One of the most telling factors is the extent to which programme headcount – specifically internal resources – increases over time.  The back story is often that the more a programme struggles, the more resources are committed to the fight – especially internal resources where the accounting is not always quite so transparent.  However, throwing bodies at problems can be extremely counter-productive for a whole variety of reasons.  Again, one for a deeper article, but if you look up The Ringelmann Effect, you’ll get the idea.  The important question to answer is how the resourcing is changing over time, and why, so that you can extrapolate.

Seventh on the diagnostic list is the degree of impact on the organisation’s target operating model.  One of the more subtle aspects when a programme gets into deep water is the marked tendency to focus on platform to the exclusion of all else: The whole concept of target operating model is the first thing to be jettisoned, often not even consciously, but surprisingly early in a struggling programme.  If the programme is genuinely high-stakes and transformational, why is it that not a single process or even a role will change?  Answer: Because in the fog of programme confusion, sight of what the programme was really meant to achieve has been lost, and all of that work is still out there and still needs to be delivered.

This brings us neatly to the eighth and final area of the patient’s anatomy; the business case, and benefits.  Struggling programmes tend to be so preoccupied with delivering capabilities that they lose focus on leveraging the capability.  The acid test is to talk to the recipients of the capability to understand just how well-developed the plans are to catch and convert.  Usually the cupboard is bare, and two reasons are often cited; one is the cynicism as regards the programme ever delivering, and the other is the extent of the function’s unanticipated involvement in the delivery itself.

So far, so good on the diagnostics.  Now the finishing touch; knitting it all together.  Whilst it’s useful to understand the twists and turns of leadership or the rise and fall of risk exposure, the composite picture only emerges once you start to cross-reference.  When the leadership changed, what happened to the issue count?  And the headcount?  And the budget?  What happened to planning/performance against plan?  Of course, the date will have pushed out, but why?  Was it a simple reset to reflect lost ground or was additional work identified?

If this all sounds retrospective, it’s probably not.  It’s more likely to be reflective of what is still happening within the programme, because until these problems are specifically identified, they can’t be engineered out of the delivery.  In investment, past performance is potentially an indictor of future performance.  In programmes, recent history is likely to be a strong indicator of what’s still happening even now.

Back to the doctor-patient analogy: The above diagnostics may suggest a gloomy prognosis, but just as with personal health, it’s all about the timing.  In the early stages of a struggling programme, these symptoms provide glimpses of the future.  Act early, and the prognosis can be very positive: You may actually end up with an even healthier programme because of the interventions.  However, wait for the fully developed picture, and you definitely won’t like what you see, which brings me to the final point in this article:  Calling out a failing programme in its early stages takes guts, but as the above illustrates, it also takes technique.  Part of that technique is how to deliver the call-out collaboratively from within the C-suite; one for next time.