Today I have been working on a new project, I know near enough what needs to be done, but I don’t have enough information to understand how the tasks fit together.
It reminded me of the famous Morecombe and Wise sketch, in which Eric plays the piano to the world famous conductor Andre Previn. As Eric says, “I can play all the notes, ……”.
Welcome to the Eric Morecombe School of Project Planning, “I can list all the tasks,…… but not necessarily in the right order”.
As Project Manager you have been hired to make change happen. You may agree with the change, you may not. Doesn’t matter your role is to manage the project which delivers that change.
The assumption is that the senior management in the organisation who have taken the decision on behalf of the organisation to implement the change will have created the conditions for that project’s success e.g. people will have been informed about the project, they will be aware of the implications of the change, they will clear about why the organisation should take this action, and what the benefits are.
Pigs may also fly.
Most likely you will find that people who will be most affected by the change may only have a vague notion about what’s occurring, but it has been left to you the Project Manager to sell the idea as well as implement it.
When you find yourself in the invidious position of being dumped on, here is some advice:
Remember if you have been dumped on you are probably being lined up as the fall guy. If the project fails it is down to you, if not it is down to someone else.
If you get off the train at St Pancras heading for the Piccadilly line, you now have to walk about a mile to the tube. For anyone going to Russell Square, it would be quicker to walk, believe me.
However a few weeks back, as I hurried through the concourse I noticed a Minister on one of the big Sky News screens dismissing the TUC March for the Alternative. Although 400,000 people marched at that rally to protest against the government cuts, the Minister on TV maintained the cuts were necessarry…blah…blah, last Labour government…blah…blah, Greece and Ireland…. blah… blah, but incredibly there is now little mention of cuts to the government ‘back office’.
As I pointed out in one of my last posts, although ‘back office’ cuts became a mantra of the ‘how’, around public sector cuts in the lead up to the election, there is now little mention of these ‘easy’ gains eleven months on.
Ministers it seems have now began to realise how difficult these cuts are to achieve, because the back office is in reality outsourced. In a recent Audit Office review it was found that literally thousands of different contracts exist across central and local government, the police and quangos etc, but the vast majority of these contracts were with just five suppliers. Each of these big companies are not going to give ground without a fight or at least compensation, they have hundreds of contracts which are stitched up years into the future.
The Government is appointing procurement commissioners to sort out this tangled outsourced web, but however big their talk prior to the election, cutting costs in any office is going to take years to achieve.
Great companies have a single purpose that drives them toward success. That purpose is simple, straightforward, and no longer than a sentence. For example, Google’s is “We organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. This is not a tag line but a single idea that defines the company’s reason for existing.
Could you do the same for your projects, or have they morphed so much since the original PID, that the objectives are now a bit wishy-washy. You have a few days over Easter to ponder just what the project is that you are spending your working life sweating over. If you don’t understand what it is, stands to reason, that others in the organisation will think likewise.
So think about your key project and put it into a sentence, try to make it focused and succinct, then when you get back to work reaquaint your team with what they are working for and use it to drive success.
There was mirth in the The Sun last week when they revealed that the MOD were buying lightbulbs for £22.51, that cost just 65p from any DIY store.
The MOD and all government departments will be buying thousands of different items every day, so how can they ensure good value? In most companies, where profit is dependent on minimising cost, the Enterprise Management Systems (EMS) control inventory, financial transactions, billing, and accounting. In a revolution that happened in most companies around two decades ago, systems that just performed one function e.g. invoicing were brought together by systems like SAP to provide an automated back office.
It was about this time that the term “back office” came into regular business parlance, the term is derived from the layout of early companies, where the front office would be customer facing and the back office would house manufacturing, marketing and administration.
In large organisations, continents will often separate the front and back office functions, but control is maintained via the EMS. These systems are the glue that bind global corporations together, and have grown to provide a humming backbone which monitors every transaction, consolidates every record, bills every customer, pays every supplier, and reports every variance. In many companies it is the efficiency of their back office, and the quality of information derived from this mass of transactional data that enables them to squeeze fractions of a percentage point margin over their competitors and add millions of pounds to their bottom line.
As the Government looks to reduce the deficit, ministers are being asked to explain where the cuts in their department will be coming from. A familiar response is along the lines of “We are protecting our front line services”, but with the added proviso ”this will unfortunately mean cutting the back office”. Few ministers have any business knowledge, Liam Fox at the MOD was a GP prior to entering government. Few understand what the back office means and what it does. Few comprehend that automating the back office has been a major driver to increasing corporate profitability over the past ten years.
By all means cut the back office, but it has to be automated and the government needs to join up, so that local systems do not just handle thousands of transactions but billions. For example there are 43 police forces in England and Wales, all procure the same merchandise, all bill the same suppliers. Dont just cut, consolidate costs. There are hundreds of councils across the country all with the same business model. Dont just cut, cooperate on costs. There are huge sprawling monolithic departments of state with massive bureaucracies. Dont just cut, control costs.
If you are an RAF pilot consigned to flying a desk at the MOD in Whitehall, it must be galling to be continually reminded by the National Audit Office that your project management skills will never get off the ground. Most recently their complaint has been about the 160 Typhoon fighter planes procured by the RAF. These are 75% over budget, and only include an air combat version. The ground attack version will not be available until 2018, some thirty years after the project was started.
What with this and the debacles around the scrapping out of date Nimrods whilst they were being built, and keeping new Chinook helicopters in air conditioned hangers rather that put them into service because they were equipped with the wrong software, is surely evidence of a systemic failure in project organisation.
Pilots have to have years of training before they can fly fast jets, and it takes hundreds of flying hours to hone and develop their flying skills. When we fly EasyJet to Alicante, it is of course reassuring that there is a pilot in the front seat rather than a project manager with some experience on MS Flight Simulator. So how much more reassuring would it be for tax payers, if trained project managers with hundreds of project hours experience, rather than pilots were to fly the projects at the MOD.
If you were the hard pressed catering manager of a NHS hospital, and Heston Blumenthal turned up with a television crew, and an idea to transform hospital food by feeding the patients worms, you would be right to shake your head in disbelief.
The head of catering at Alder Hay Children’s hospital in Liverpool did a lot of head shaking at Heston, usually with the words ‘never in the NHS’. In the programme ‘Mission Impossible’ on Channel 4 in which Heston tries to revolutionise commercial catering, neither Heston’s mad menu, or the slop the hospital cooked up were right for the kids, but it was interesting to observe the NHS culture.
The kitchen had eight chef’s, the food was cooked fresh everyday, and there was a wide choice of dishes available. However this menu was only available for the staff and the restaurant. Six of the cooks prepared meals for the staff, but only two of the cooks prepared the sick children’s meals, which were a mess of spaghetti, waffles, chips, beans and pizza.
No doubt the medical care was superb, but patient care was more custard than cuisine. Senior management seemed unaware that the food was so awful that the children’s mums were smuggling in M&S sandwiches, while they dined elsewhere on a bistro menu. A caring professional organisational culture that allows this to happen, needs some major surgery.
Subscribe to iJourneys
