Business Cases: Official vs Personal

We all know the rules about business cases:

• A project should not be initiated unless the appropriate stakeholders accept the business case;
• The outcomes of the business case form part of the success criteria for the project, and;
• The project manager is responsible for achieving those outcomes.

The project manager periodically checks that the project is delivering a solution that satisfies the business case and, if it’s not, puts it back on course.

From time to time, the project manager also confirms that the reasons for the business case are still valid. If they aren’t, the project is cancelled so the people involved can move onto work that serves the business.

A project can have a couple of different business cases. It will always have the official business case, created by the business to fulfill their goals. It can also have a vendor’s business case – this is created in response to their customer’s business case and incorporates both the customer’s and the vendor’s reasons for being involved in the project.

But there’s another business case that usually doesn’t get the attention it deserves – your own.

Your personal business case consists of the reasons why you’re involved in the project, such as monetary reward, reputation, job security and/or the intellectual challenge. But like any other business case, if you’re not really clear about your goals up front, and don’t review your progress towards them regularly, you run the real risk of putting in a lot of time and effort to find you haven’t met them in the end.

As for any other business case, your personal business case serves two purposes:

1. It gives you the ‘it’s just not worth it –I’m outta here’ criteria, and, more importantly;
2. It drives you forward – when you’re in the heat of battle, it reminds you why you’re working so hard and putting yourself under pressure.

So know your personal business case before the project starts – be very clear about the reasons you’re involved in the project, and define your exit criteria now, before the going gets tough. Then, with regular reviews, you’ll be able to keep focused on what’s important, stay motivated through those tough times and achieve your goals.

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Standish Chaos Report 2009: Are projects failing or are Project Managers failing?

Various project management research reports are reporting declining project success rates.

From the Standish Chaos Report:

• 32% of all projects succeed
• 44% of all projects were challenged
• 24% of all projects failed

But these statistics don’t give an accurate view of how successful the project managers themselves were – the percentages aren’t spread evenly across all project managers.

As with any group of people engaged in an activity, there’s a bell curve of ability – a small number of project managers are very good at driving projects to success, a large number are just average at it and another small group are very unsuccessful.

So for the projects above, most of the 32% that succeeded would have been driven by the very good project managers, most of the challenged projects would have belonged to the average PMs, and the very unsuccessful PMs would have run a disproportionate number of the 24% that failed.

Sure there are external factors, but all projects have them and 32% of those were successful. A good project manager works with the external factors to bring them into their sphere of influence where they can deal with the factors and prevent them crashing the project.

So which group do you want to be in? And if you’re not there yet, what are you doing to get there?

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Saved by the Bell Curve?

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Saved by the Bell Curve?

For any activity – golf, business, financial management, karate, poker, art, work, music etc – there’s a small number of people doing it who are not good at it at all, a large number of people who are average at it and a small number of people who are extremely good at it.

Plot this on a graph and it creates a bell shape – the large bulge in the middle is the people who are average at the activity. While people can and do move from not very good to average, very few move from average to extremely good.

So how do you move to extremely good?

First identify what the average people are doing to achieve their mediocrity. This is what it takes to be average, and you can avoid it or stop doing it.

Then identify what the successful people are doing and start doing that. And watch your success grow.

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Conquer the dark sides of perfectionism

There’s a dark side?

Being a perfectionist is good, isn’t it? It means you do something right, first time and every time and it’s something a lot of people aspire to. Well, actually perfection is a highly overrated goal which can disrupt your working life and kill your dreams.

First, to do something perfectly usually takes a lot of effort. You do it, re-do it, re-re-do it and it’s still not quite right, and you’re way over your deadline. The people relying on you find this frustrating, even if your work is totally flawless – they’re held up by your strive for an ideal when they would have been just as satisfied with an on-time result that gave them what they wanted. They’ll stop getting you to do work for them and you may find yourself moved on.

The solution to this is to know that a ‘perfect’ job is one that exactly meets the expected level of results. If you’re going to be perfect at something, be perfect at finding out what that level is and meeting it, rather than applying your own exacting, and possibly inaccurate, measures.

The real dark side

The second problem with being a perfectionist is that it causes you to delay or, worse still, not start things because you fear you won’t be able to do a perfect job straight away.

As you progress through life, you naturally get better at things, and you grow accustomed to finding success at a decreasing range of activities.

As a child, you put in a huge amount of effort into learning to walk, and most of that time was spent on your backside. Most adults would not put that much effort into learning something, especially if they had such setbacks – they’d say ‘I’m just not good at this – it didn’t work for me the first time, I’ll go back to something I know I can do’.

At work, you may stick to the job you know, even though it’s boring, because you think, quite rightly, that you won’t be perfect in that challenging new job immediately. Or you might put off doing that huge paper because you know you won’t be happy with the first draft – suddenly it’s due and your job’s on the line.

Say you dream of becoming an artist, or a writer, or a tennis ace. But knowing the amount of work that will be needed before you reach a level of average proficiency, you don’t try at all. All that effort, just to become average?

So what’s the answer?

Realise what world champions, and toddlers, already know – no-one’s perfect the first time at something new. Keep working on it and you’ll start to see small, ever-increasing successes that will spur you on and reinforce your efforts – the occasional really good brush-stroke, a pretty great turn of phrase or a better than average tennis serve.

And keep trying – don’t let the dark side of perfectionism prevent you from chasing your dreams.

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