Why do so many projects fail, even if the team members are working so hard? Like, that's what I see, I see a lot of people working really hard doing long hours.
And yet, the stats say that many projects will fail.
I want to introduce you to two ideas that I'm running concurrently for whatever ADHD brain I have.
But I have read the first book called The unofficial project manager, very interesting idea in this book, and that is that many people in the West at least have moved out of CIT work out of work that is routine, like just being in a factory, and instead, they are in this knowledge work.
But this knowledge work is heavily project-based.
And yet, no one has had any project training.
Now, it's not that there isn't project training out there.
There are whole books written on it, there are institutes for it, but most people have found themselves doing work that is project-based, but no training, there was just left out, it was like, hey, get the work done.
But we're not going to give you any training about how to get the work done.
Now, I want to couple that up with a second audiobook, this is an audiobook called The unicorn project, it's a sequel to a book called the Phoenix Project.
And it basically documents the second version of similar problems that the Phoenix Project documented, which was the journey of DevOps.
Now, DevOps was a solution that arose in software development, because when you split development and operations, then there are all sorts of problems.
And even though it made sense, at an operational level to say, hey, these guys are doing development, these guys are doing operations, these guys doing quality assurance, these guys are doing information security.
That while the people might have been organized like that the work was not the projects were not because of the project's required people from all four of those aspects.
So we've got an interesting situation here.
One is that most people are doing project work with no project training and that if your design work by categories of work, it's very easy to end up with silos of people that are doing similar work but require other silos of people to actually get the results, the results that they want.
This, this situation means that you will commonly have a lot of slow work a lot of waiting time.
It's so interesting the unicorn project, they reference Dr. Seuss.
Now this is the second time that I've seen Dr. Seuss referenced in recent memory.
One was the hard thing about hard things.
If you are in upper management.
If you're a CEO, and you haven't read the hard things about hard things, then I highly recommend it's super cool.
The Dr. Seuss masterpiece is yours all the turtle, but that's not the one that's referenced in the unicorn project.
Instead, it is Oh, the Places You'll Go one of my favorites.
Dr. Seuss is right up there with Cat in the Hat.
Oh, the places you go.
Why is it because it documents wonderfully beautifully in only the way that Dr. Seuss can, The Waiting Place, and the interesting problems that arise when we have work people that are siloed?
But the work requires all of them to get the result.
And that is that they end up in the waiting place.
It ends up with bureaucracy with control with a lot of disheartened people will end up having project failures.
And the interesting thing coming back to the unofficial project manager is that without any project training, it is very easy just to set up around ideas that seem logical that seem like the work, but they don't take into account dependencies.
They don't make into account intermediate results that you've got to get in order to get to that final result.
Most of the time is not even focused on what the result is.
That's not clearly defined.
There are no timelines.
There's no work put into it.
actually working out what a win is, leads to scope creep.
And this is going on all the time.
And it all got a lot worse with the wonderful COVID.
Why? Because COVID is exposing what's not working, because of all of the government intervention saying, Hey, you got to do this, you got to do that, that it's adding layer upon layer of difficulty on systems, that copes.
Okay, when COVID Wasn't there, because people would be aware enough to go, Oh, hey, I'm going to catch it there can see the error there.
But now they're not now they're like, oh, I gotta wear a mask, I've got to stand on my head, I got to do this, I got to do that.
I'm not even actually going to work, because the government's just going to pay me I'm like, well, that's, that's an interesting idea.
And you might get away with it in a highly efficient world.
But what I believe is potentially going on is that we are not in that highly efficient world.
And we are at risk of having serious problems.
I don't know whether they're going to play out or not, I hope they do not.
I truly hope that we do not end in a world of scarcity and problems that the that our choices that our governments choices, at least if you're in Australia, or in the United States, or Canada, where it's like the only thing that counts is COVID.
All right, well, that might be true.
Up until a points when there's no food on the table, you see food on the table, many problems, no food on the table, one problem.
And to get food on the table, at least in this modern age, guess what, somebody else planted that food, somebody else put seeds in the ground and watered it and farmed it and and harvested and packaged it and then took it to a supermarket and I was able to exchange money for the goods.
But as more systems problems appear, and breakdowns begin to happen, and suddenly you've got a lot of money printing without much production, then you risk high rates of inflation.
And we're already seeing this, we're seeing inflation, we're seeing supply chain breakdowns, we're seeing people unable to focus because they're so filled with difficulties about how to actually live these days.
Perhaps they're failing to exercise failing to meditate, increased fighting, increased alcohol, increased domestic violence, increased problems across the board.
And what this does, this is particularly interesting, I'm not sure if you're familiar, I'm sure you are with the Swiss cheese model of errors so that the holes have to line up in order for the error to occur.
And it doesn't happen that often.
Often there'll be a safety net.
But as we've gone through COVID, and people undertrained in systems, and there is a focus on the organization by work type instead of by result, all of this has led to a widening of each of these holes.
And now the chances of a particular random event causing catastrophic errors are increasing.
And we may be as I have referenced in previous episodes, we don't know where we are in this journey.
Right now, the problems that we're seeing now are from June 2020? Are they from October 2020? Are they from March 2021? We don't know it might only be the consequences showing up now from decisions that were made a year and a half ago.
Why because we are talking about giant economies.
And so there's a backlog of work that was going to get completed before the problems began.
And so this means that we are likely to see more project failures, we're going to see more difficulties and less what unless something changes unless an awareness comes in around what to focus on around how to do projects to dramatically increase the chances of success.
Chapter one on an official project manager the traditional thought process equals success.
But you must realize that processes by themselves are useless.
You see nothing gets done with a document that is unread or unused or not written But when a person comes in and uses that process, now the work gets done.
And so unofficial project manager says that the correct the most beneficial choice to get success in your projects is people plus process.
Typically, people just go about doing the best they can problem solve problems, solve problems, so, but the difficulties of our world are increasing the distraction factor increasing, the danger factor of getting through that Swiss cheese in causing major areas is increasing.
So you've got to make the change, you have to learn what to focus on.
And I'm going to suggest that what you should focus on is the results.
And if that, we come back to our software idea if that means that to get a result, you need two developers, and two in ops and one in QA and one in InfoSec.
That is your team to get the results.
That is your bundle of people required to get the result.
And when you focus on the results that you want, then it starts to make sense about how to set up your projects, how to set up your systems, how to set up your teams, because you are focused on what counts which is the results.
You want some help about how to set up systems so that your people can use your processes to get the results that make a difference in your business so that your team can work more effectively go home on time, you can take more profit home and you can sell your business at much higher multiples, then head over system io.
Thanks for tuning in today.
I hope you got a lot of value out of today's episode as we continue this journey into the power of systems to create results.
See you again next time.
