The podcast by project managers for project managers. An episode about detecting imminent failure and dealing with project issues that could lead to failure. The project manager’s approach to supporting the team, addressing issues, and communicating resolutions is crucial for any project facing adversity.

Table of Contents

01:56 … Meet Susan03:54 … Susan’s Project Story08:30 … When Nobody Speaks Up10:59 … Warning Signs15:55 … When is the Project Manager at Fault19:38 … Sequestering the Team22:25 … Maintaining Communication Channels26:40 … Root Cause Analysis28:30 … Documenting Lessons Learned31:06 … The Resolution of Susan’s Project34:05 … Get in Touch with Susan35:03 … Closing

SUSAN IRWIN:  It’s not about ego.  It is about furthering the practice of project management, it is about making everybody great.  It is about working together as a unified team. Not just a project team, but a project manager team, to make each one of us great.

WENDY GROUNDS:  You’re listening to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  I’m Wendy Grounds, and with me is Bill Yates.  So an interesting thing happened to us the other day. As we were preparing to record this podcast, two days ago, we had some equipment failure.

BILL YATES:  Yes, we did.

WENDY GROUNDS:  And that amounts to a project failure.

BILL YATES:  Yes.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Have you ever had a project fail, Bill?

BILL YATES:  Yes, I certainly have.  I think most who are listening to this can relate.  I think it was quite ironic that we would have a project failure, even with our episode as we were going to record this. First time.  That’s too funny.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Fortunately, Danny got us fixed up, and we’re ready to go today.

BILL YATES:  You know, Wendy, it occurs to me this topic is one that is really rich.  And we offer an online course by Neal  Whitten on this topic of project failure.  It’s called “17 Top Reasons Why Projects Fail.”  Neal goes through those.  He introduces those 17, and then of course talks about how we can avoid them.  So another way we can go deeper in this topic.

WENDY GROUNDS:  We’re actually talking with someone who has experience in project failure.  Our guest is Susan Irwin, and she’s an adjunct professor at the University of Alabama, Collat School of Business.

BILL YATES:  Wendy, this is going to be a pertinent conversation for our listeners.  And I’m excited to have Susan with us.  She has great information about both how to detect when failure is imminent with a project, and then advice.  So she gives four areas of advice for those that are dealing with project issues that could lead to failure.  So let’s get into it with Susan.

Meet Susan

WENDY GROUNDS:  Susan, welcome to Manage This.  Thank you so much for being our guest.

SUSAN IRWIN:  Yes, thank you.  I’m so excited to be able to share my ideas.

WENDY GROUNDS:  We’re looking forward to hearing your story.  But I want to ask you about your career background.  Can you tell me how you got into project management?

SUSAN IRWIN:  So I’ve been doing this for about 15 years.  And so like most project managers that have been doing it for this long, I actually stumbled into it by happenstance. I was a developer by trade.  I was really content on spending my life in the development side of the house.  A manager at the time saw something in me, and this was back when project management was first starting to come into industry.  You didn’t really see it much outside of the government sector. 

He asked me if I wanted to step into this role as a project manager. I really was apprehensive about it because I didn’t really see at that time the value in project management.  I felt that project managers were more of the gatekeeper and less of the facilitator of getting work done. And so I begrudgingly did it, and I fell in love with it.

So I went in, I did my PMP certification, and fell in love with it. And where I originally thought it was more of a gatekeeper or wasn’t allowing you to move projects forward. I actually found that, no, project managers do open up that gate and do facilitate and do shield the team and make sure things get accomplished.  So I went and did an MBA with an emphasis in project management, and then went on ahead and did my Ph.D. in information technology with an emphasis on project management.  So I teach classes and I often tell my students, as you can tell by all my certifications and my degrees, my love of project management now that has grown over the years.  And I love the fact that now you can get those degrees in project management that didn’t exist before.

BILL YATES:  That’s true.

Susan’s Project Story

WENDY GROUNDS:  You had written an article on project failure. And I want to just lead into that with you telling us the story about this project.  Could you introduce what happened?

SUSAN IRWIN:  Yes.  So I was actually the portfolio manager, or the program manager, on this project, and I had 13 lanes.  Our project was at a local bank here in town. We were to move our third-party processing from one vendor to another.  So we interfaced with our new third-party vendor. And then we had outside components that also interfaced in with our third-party processors.  So they obviously had to move, as well.  This particular article stemmed out of an issue where, at the time, we had received a go from all parties involved. So from the original organization, from the new third-party processor, and from the third-party vendor that was interfacing in.  And so we had received a go that we were ready to move this into production.

Now, this was a two-year project, multimillion-dollar project.  So we were about two weeks away from our targeted go-live date.  About a week later, we had a meeting with our new third-party processor, and one lone individual threw his hand up and said, “I really don’t think we’re ready,” and explained the reason why.  And so really what he was expecting to see from test cases he had not seen come across. So that spurred into a bunch of discussions with different individuals.  And so we had, just to kind of give you our leadership perspective, I had a business sponsor, I had an executive business sponsor, I had a technology sponsor and executive technology sponsor.

So as you can tell, frustrations are high, people are concerned. People are going, well, how am I culpable in this situation?  How did we get here?  And so I had one individual who went and gave the story to the chief technology officer, the CTO at the time, that this was a failure of project management, without any background or anything.  I was extremely upset because the narrative of this was we had no facts to base this on. And so this article was my response to that, as opposed to sending the scathing email that I wanted to do.

But as I started looking at this, I started thinking, well, if I’m going through this, maybe other people are going through this, as well.  So fast-forwarding into the situation we had, at that point in time we were a week out.  We had already done a go here.  And we needed to figure out how are we going to get from where we’re at to where we need to be. And figure out how we can get some semblance of a go-live date in very short form because, every single time we move this date out, there’s a cost implication to it. 

So pulled the team together, had daily meetings with everybody.  Pulled this list of all the things that the third-party processing vendor was expecting to see, and worked with this third-party processor to get those in place. Make sure we have those tested, and then get those signed off.

And then, as we started digging deep into this, I had an opportunity to speak with my portfolio manager about this. And I said, you know, we typically put safety gates in to ensure that we don’t have these project failures.  So you have risk and issue management.  Well, we actually had a risk associated to this vendor as not being prepared as we originally thought. So we had that safety gate in that we were tracking.  Then we had a go/no-go decision point that we were tracking.  Then we had a meeting with the bank, the third-party processor, and the outside vendor. And so we had another safety gate where we had between the third-party processor and us. And we had another safety gate between us and the third party. 

So as you can tell, we had safety gates in place.  But we blew through all of them. Because in reality the root cause of this was no one felt like they had the authority to be able to stand up and say, hey, we’re not ready.  Here’s a problem, and this is what’s happening.

When Nobody Speaks Up

BILL YATES:  This is so, so interesting.  And so relatable, unfortunately, I think, to most of our listeners. We’ve all been in situations where the wheels fall off of a project.  I’ve got to ask you, so when you say you blew through the safety gates, by that do you mean the indications were there that, okay, we’re not really passing the quality checkpoints that we had in place, but nobody’s wanting to raise their hand and bring attention to it?  So is that what’s going on?

SUSAN IRWIN:  Well, yeah, we’re blowing through these, so we’re getting a go.  We’re getting through each of these meetings.  Nobody’s raising their hand.  And it’s not until post-go, when we’re having one of these meetings, we’re up against the go-live date, that a single individual raises his hand and says, “We’re not in a position where we can go, and here’s the reason why.”

BILL YATES:  Wow.  So nobody was brave enough, if you will, to say, hey, the emperor has no clothes kind of a thing.  Looks like nobody wanted to do that.

SUSAN IRWIN:  Yeah.  That’s 100 percent correct.  And again, I had been doing this for 15 years, you know, and several years before that in the technology management side, just without the title.