To reduce the pain of failed projects, get small

I enjoyed Gretchen Gavett's post last week on the HBR Blog Network entitled "The Hidden Indicators of a Failing Project." In it, she discusses how to determine whether projects are going bad (before costly, late public failures, such as the launch of the healthcare.gov website).

Gavett rightly points out that we have biases that prevent us from admitting that our project may not be going as well as we'd like - such as the urge to avoid the recriminations and criticism that comes with calling a project that is going off the rails. The "quiet fixing" mentality also rules, as one of Gavett's sources states: "people actually think they can turn [a failing project] around, so they don’t bring it up." She passes along several pieces of advice to help diagnose problem projects: e.g., cast a wide net of knowledge, revisit requirements regularly, etc.

In my view, the most effective way to prevent big, expensive project failures is to break projects up into smaller chunks. Large projects have large, abstract goals and take a long time to complete - and a long time before end customers get a look at what was delivered (see: healthcare.gov). In uncertain situations (i.e., most projects), it is better to have clear goals than a completely defined plan.

When projects are decomposed into smaller deliverables, each chunk can be specified at a level to deliver value to the end-customer - instead of abstract deliverables such as diagrams, specs, etc. The customer (as opposed to project team members) determines whether the project meets requirements. Smaller projects with clear objectives are easier to measure. Due to this clarity, failures are not only less frequent, but are discovered more quickly and are more contained. The inevitable changes to project requirements are absorbed more easily because smaller pieces can be adapted cheaply. The epitome of this type of approach is the Toyota Production System, which pushes improvement responsibility to the lowest possible level on the factory floor, and through many many iterations of tiny projects, adapts a highly complex production process to the changing needs of the global car market.

So, to reduce the cost and pain with large project failures, do one thing: get small.

VC Ed Sim: "Never give up but move on quickly"

The title is from a 2011 post from Ed's blog Beyond VC. At first (and maybe second) glance this is a paradox. At the heart of this paradox is one of the deeper secrets for learning from mistakes. Let's deconstruct it:

"Never give up..." This is a mantra repeated over and over again on this site, including Garr Reynolds's "Fall down 7 times, get up 8" and Angela Duckworth's discussions of grit. Persistence is essential to power past stumbles, failures, criticism, ridicule - all conditions that come before worthwhile successes.

...but move on quickly" - this refers to the ability to maturely sniff out a situation that is heading for failure, and not devote endless work cycles to trying to pull a success from the jaws of failure. Overall success requires diagnosing, with evidence, counsel and your own intuition, the smaller failures that come up along the way, and shifting your approach quickly after the diagnosis comes in.

"Never give up but move on quickly" is one of the Scylla-Charybdis balancing acts (per Albert Wenger) necessary to be a good entrepreneur or really senior leader of any kind.

Why do losing sales deals last longer than winners?

An interesting post by Michael Liebow on Selling Power ("To Improve Sales Performance, Fail Faster") says this:

Looking at a knowledge base of deals assembled from a variety of companies and industries and totaling more than 10,000 opportunities, the numbers are striking. Winning deals on average took only 75 days to close, while losing deals took 175 days to close out ― 100 days longer.

We've looked at the idea of "chasing losses" in another post. Rather than quickly cutting losses, we tend to chase them, hoping things will turn around and validate our initial beliefs. In the above study, salespeople and sales managers "chased their losses" twice as long as they pursued wins.

Liebow continues:

This culture of bravado makes cleaning a sales pipe nearly impossible. Yet what can only be described as losing fodder must be cleaned out of the pipe if an organization ever hopes to leverage its investment in the sales process. Thus, the trick to winning is to find a way to allow for a clear quantitative assessment of the pipe and clean it so that your best people across your organization are available to spend precious resources, time, and cycles on the deals with the highest likelihood of winning.

Salespeople, like all of us, need to face problems squarely in order to be successful. Figure out your losing opportunities, and stop working on them. Now.