Monday 4 March 2013

Marching to the beat


It's amazing how many parallels can be drawn from an IT project to reflect many situations in life. Let me start by giving you my definition of a project as it may help to highlight the point I'll be trying to make here. 

A project is a group of individuals working together to achieve a beneficial outcome

Quite a simple a high level description but I personally feel it succinctly describes what it projects are all about. Like any machine you can care to think of, it's a sum of specialised parts brought together to perform specific tasks, each component has a responsibility to the whole otherwise the machine will work inefficiently or in the worst case, break down.

Now I'm not going to have some cliched or kitsch analogy (for once) about certain roles being separate parts of the machine as I think that's been done to death but I do want to talk about the importance of the single most important aspect of any project and that is the outcome, the goal.

Now I know that projects fail for a variety of reasons which are many and varied (and well documented) but, in my opinion, one of the most important and avoidable reasons is making sure that everyone involved in the project from the executive sponsor, right down to the developer realise that they are part of the whole.

I'm sitting in front of my TV at home right now watching a military documentary and they currently have a number of soldiers marching in ranks, each soldier is marching in-step with his colleagues, everyone going at the same speed, in the same direction and all heading to the same place. I thought about some of the projects I've worked on in my career and as I expand the the thought I imagined what some of them would have looked like in this setting. Try and picture it yourselves,

  • A bunch of soldiers running off in front of the group, 
  • A few individuals meandering off in a completely different direction
  • Some people standing still looking bemused and finally my favourite
  • The group of individuals trying to rein in the group all shouting conflicting instructions

A project team can only operate successfully  if everyone is working for each other, all going in the same direction, all making sure that everyone understands where they are going, what their role is. It's not a complicated or impossible task but it is surely one of the most important things you need to get right from the start and something that can be easily overlooked as the project picks up pace.

This concept also scales out from the team and can be applied to programs and even large enterprises. It's certainly something to consider when you are looking at starting a project and thinking you can save time by cutting short the kick off and planning stages.