5 Principle #2: A clear purpose informs and inspires

Rationale, (dis)benefits, sustainability

Before embarking on a new project, it is essential to develop a simple purpose statement that articulates both the problem and the solution.

Projects are about change: sometimes that involves building a new piece of infrastructure, or launching a new product, and at other times it is about enabling new behaviour through new software or the launch of a new product. The rationale and business case for a new project will often describe the process of what needs to be done in a form of business or financial language and in a level of granular detail that can, ironically, make the whole thing hard to grasp for the layperson. And if you can’t understand what is planned or why, then you’re unlikely to be motivated to get involved.

The problem of not being able to see the wood for the trees may be exaggerated for projects where the outcome is intangible, or even uncertain, at the starting point – as is the case for many software or business change projects.

Project success requires that you complement the technical planning documentation by identifying and stating the deeper purpose of the project.

Business case

All project management methodologies require a well-defined business case before projects are ever initiated. By now you probably know that this is never an exact science. Have you ever seen a negative business case?

Business cases are biased. Those responsible for running the project are apt to forget the challenges and shortcomings of earlier projects if they managed ultimately to cross the finishing line. Everyone who pitches a project wants it to be approved, and so they frame their business case on the basis of what they perceive the decision makers want to hear. Decision makers are complicit; how can any project they approve be anything but successful? Consequently, business cases suffer from subjective assumptions about the likely costs, the risks and the ultimate benefits, either through ignorance or deliberate bias. Have you ever seen a project with a negative or meagre return being presented? Optimism bias may lay big projects open to cost or schedule overruns or even to failure. But without it, why would Steve Jobs or any one of those tasked with project approval say ‘yes’ to the hugely innovative projects for which they are remembered?

Take the example of Concorde, a British–French turbojet-powered supersonic passenger airliner that operated between 1976 and 2003. The business case predicted enormous commercial demand, estimating that up to 350 units would be sold.1 In the end, cost and restrictions on the routes that could be flown meant that Air France and British Airways were the only airlines to purchase and fly the Concorde. A total of only 20 units were ever built and only 14 of those were sold, representing a £4 billion loss on the project’s balance sheet.

Or another ongoing and more recent case: the Hanford nuclear weapons development site in south-eastern Washington state is widely considered to be the most contaminated place in the Western hemisphere. In 1989, the US Energy Department, Environmental Protection Agency and the Washington State Department of Ecology launched an environmental clean-up programme to tackle massive amounts of radioactive and chemical waste. The original plan laid out a thirty-year clean-up programme, but things have not gone according to that plan, and the Hanford clean-up is now expected to take at least seventy years to complete.2

There are hundreds of other examples of overly optimistic predictions in high-profile projects. In some cases, this over-optimism is effectively designed into the project from the start, as was the case for the Channel Tunnel project.

A key element of the initial competition in 1994–95 to find a promoter for the Link was the level of direct grants required by each bidder. As the level of direct grants would depend on the amount of revenue each bidder thought it could secure from operating Eurostar UK, there was an in-built incentive for bidders to be over-optimistic about the prospects for the business.3

In other words, if you wanted to win the contract, you needed to present (wildly) over-optimistic forecasts. This state of affairs still remains a risk for most government procured projects and programmes today.

Preparation of a business case is a very useful exercise and should not be skipped or cut short. The thinking process, the research, the data gathering and the analysis of the options all help you establish a good, shared understanding of the project and its investment potential. Nevertheless, I recommend caution regarding the business case and the projected returns in financial figures, particularly the expected benefits. Based on my experience, evaluating costs tends to be more accurate than evaluating benefits, where there can be more unknowns, extra assumptions, and the process can extend over years, even decades – assuming the organization bothers to do it at all.

Rationale

To mitigate the risks of an overly optimistic business case, I recommend you think in terms of the rationale for the project.

Viewed simply, the two main rationales for launching a project are either to solve a problem or to seize an opportunity. Ask yourself the following questions before you get started.

• What is the problem we are going to solve with this project?
  When the Panama Canal was first built, before the First World War, it was the size of US Navy ships that dictated the width of the locks: 110 feet across and 42 feet deep. The $5 billion upgrade of the canal, opened a hundred years later, was needed to accommodate the modern ‘neo-Panamax’ ships which can be more than 150 feet wide, extend three football fields in length and have a draught of 50 feet.4
• What is the opportunity we are going to capture with the project?
  The Airbus A380 was designed to exploit the continued expansion in demand for air travel (at the time, demand was doubling every fifteen years) while recognizing the challenge of overcrowded landing slots and the need to become more environmentally sustainable.

If the outcome of your planned project cannot easily and plainly be expressed in terms of a problem or an opportunity, then you should refrain from launching your project and research it further until you are confident that you have established the true rationale behind it.

Objectives

In addition to a clear rationale, your project will need at least one SMART objective. The significance of SMART objectives should not be underestimated.

The definition of SMART

These are objectives which are specific, measurable, action-oriented, relevant and time-bound.

• Specific
  Plenty of projects have delivered, only to discover that the output isn’t what the stakeholders anticipated they would be getting. Your objective needs to distinguish between a project’s output and its outcome. For example: ‘A solution that enables knowledge storage, publication, discovery and sharing between clients.’ Your objective should leave it up to the project team or the developer to decide exactly what solution they will adopt.
• Measurable
  In the above example, the measure of success is knowledge storage, publication, discovery and sharing (between clients). If this is happening, then the project is meeting its objectives. In other examples, you may need to provide a specific number target, particularly if the project is designed to improve on a current system or capability.
• Action-oriented
  No matter how good your project management skills, an unrealistic strategy or plan will founder. Projects are designed to be stretching (that’s the whole point), which means there is always the possibility of failure. But that’s not the same as impossible.
• Relevant
  In project terms, this translates as resource-based (you need to define how much money or how many resources).
• Time-bound
  The schedule is possibly the most challenging aspect of any project. A (very) few projects are temporal (have a fixed end-date) and defined by an event such as a sporting tournament or a corporate acquisition, a regulatory compliance date or an end-of-life date (if something it is replacing is no longer working or no longer available). But all projects are subject to time, either because the passage of time may make the output redundant, or because of the ongoing cost of maintaining a project team. That said, arbitrary deadlines (similar to arbitrary budgets) will create unnecessary risk.

Elevator pitch

Every project should have a convincing elevator-pitch statement: something that expresses what it is designed to do in succinct, easily understood and convincing terms. Every business case will include within it a collection of goal statements; fine for testing the credibility of the project at initiation but hardly memorable. How many times have you sat through presentations about new products, software, or business transformation projects without ever being engaged by the idea at the heart of what is being proposed? Your elevator pitch needs to win over hard-hearted commercial directors and, at the same time, act as a clarion call to the people who might work on the project and to the stakeholders who will benefit from it.

All of which doesn’t remove from you the responsibility of ensuring that your project rationale and key objective are not being overly optimistic or poorly evidenced. The project manager and sponsor have to ensure that the goals are realistic – or, even better, stretched but achievable.

Purpose

Besides the rationale and a business case, a project should be linked to a higher purpose. Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, authors of the business classic Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies,5 provided a useful definition of ‘purpose’, which we can adapt as follows:

A project’s purpose is its fundamental reason for being. An effective purpose reflects the importance people attach to the project’s work – it taps their idealistic motivations – and gets at the deeper reasons for a project’s existence beyond just making money.

The very word ‘purpose’ resonates with ideas of identity, values and motivation. It is our value and belief system that sustains us and encourages individuals, teams and societies to achieve extraordinary things; whether these are feats of extraordinary endurance, complex engineering or unimaginable change and transformation.

The most successful project leaders know that by tapping into individuals’ hearts as well as their minds, you can inflame their imagination, focus their skills and encourage them to overcome all obstacles and differences to work together. The nice thing about it is that you don’t have to be great at something to be passionate about it. Steve Jobs was not the world’s greatest engineer, salesperson, designer or businessman. But he was uniquely good enough at all of these things, and was driven by his sense of purpose to do something far greater.

Conversely, too, lack of conviction about a project can quickly be expanded to the rest of the team.

Lessons from Crossrail

The Crossrail Project to deliver the Elizabeth Line, running east-west across the heart of London, is an exercise in complex engineering, complicated supply chains and formidable politics. The project involved building a new railway, with access stations, 40 metres deep and 26 miles long (tunnelled distance) under some of the most valuable real estate in the world, through a tangle of underground train lines, sewers, gas, electricity and communications conduits.

The Crossrail organization’s mission statement (‘Delivering a world class railway that will fast track the progress of London’) and values statement (‘Safety, Inspiration, Collaboration, Integrity and Respect’) had to sustain the project and unify the large and diverse project team to ensure a safe, high-performing and resilient working environment.

The core ‘client’ delivery organisation comprised of 1,200 people from nine different employers, integrated into a single ‘Team Crossrail’. Its role was to oversee delivery from 20 principal contractors, each with their own supply chain – a peak workforce of 14,000. This diverse team ranged from technical office roles to site construction roles, geographically dispersed across more than 40 separate projects. Some of the principal contractors operated in a joint venture environment and brought vision, mission and values from their home organisations. Taking into account that the staff of some contractors also had limited access to technology because of the nature of their role, developing and rolling out a common vision, mission and values was challenging.6

How to put Principle #2 into practice

Psychologists have done extensive research on the impact positive thinking and ‘believing in success’ can have on individuals. In fact, success is a self-fulfilling prophecy. When we expect to succeed, we automatically mobilize our internal resources to achieve the expected, and all this happens without our rational consent. Moreover, when others believe in us, the dynamic is reinforced. That is why it is important for a project leader to create a positive environment where successes are applauded and the difficulties of a project are downplayed, so that a can-do spirit and attitude are cultivated in the team. People need someone who believes in them so they can believe in themselves.

Clarity of both the purpose and the ultimate benefits of a project are fundamental, not just to ensure a coherent investment decision-making process but to guide and motivate the project team throughout the whole endeavour. Ask yourself the following questions.

• Does everyone involved in or affected by the project understand what you are planning to do and why? (They may understand the project from their own perspective, and that’s fine, but all of these perspectives need to complement each other.)
• How is your rationale expressed? Do you have a workable statement for expressing what the project will achieve, and is it clear what problem or opportunity this is addressing?
• Does your rationale allow you not simply to express success but also to identify if and when your project exceeds its scope? Or when you start to diverge from the original vision through poor procurement or poor project practice?

Once your project is under way, it is very easy to lose sight of the original intent in the pressure of managing a complex project. Ideation allows you to identify the best possible (or best feasible) solution for your project. If you have taken the time to discuss and explore alternative solutions, you will already have a sense of what won’t work or what is suboptimal, so this early preparation time not only helps assure a great project rationale but will help with managing the project too.

Principle #2 highlights the importance of a clear purpose that informs and inspires. Here are some tools to use, to get you started.

Choose the purpose

Your project’s purpose is its north star. Defining your project’s purpose is all about clarity and alignment. The purpose should not simply be fancy words – it has to be genuine and it has to feel meaningful.

Simon Sinek highlights the common practice in most organizations of setting essentially meaningless objectives: ‘I live in a world in which the overwhelming pressure is to make the numbers, hit the target … it’s all very finite … most people are incentivized based on “if you hit your numbers by a certain date”. Neglecting the facts that both those numbers and those dates are arbitrary.’7

These are a few questions that can help you to determine the purpose of your project.

• Why does the project matter?
• What opportunity would be lost if the project were not carried out?
• To whom does the project matter most? The sponsor, the project leader, everyone?
• Why would anyone dedicate their precious time, energy and passion to the project?

Another easier method of identifying the purpose of a project is to ask, ‘Why are you doing the project?’ In many cases you’ll need to repeat the question. Usually, it is necessary to ask this question five to seven times. Use the ‘why’ question in response to each of the answers you receive, to get to the essence of the matter. Once you have the real reason, substitute the original ‘why’ with ‘by when’ and ‘how much’. If after the exercise you still have not reached something concrete, then I would strongly recommend that you rethink and do not start the whole project.

Here are some questions to check the appeal of the project’s purpose, and to help you identify a project’s passion.

• Does the project have an emotional element?
• How does the project make you (and those around you) feel?
• What makes the project great and unique?
• What will be remembered about the project ten or twenty years from now?
• Why would anyone want to be part of the project team? What aspects would make people volunteer to participate and to contribute to the project?
• Do the values associated with the project and its ‘kerb appeal’ align with its purpose? Is the project’s passion aligned with the project’s purpose?

Develop and share stories

This is an effective tool to engage the organization. Strategy implementation guru Jeroen De Flander explained to me, ‘Stories make messages stickier. Wrap a story around your message and it becomes twenty times easier for the listener to remember.’8 Stories put information in a context that people can relate to.

They also offer a second benefit, which is to facilitate an emotional connection – they ‘reach for the heart’. And the great thing about stories, including project stories, is that they do not have to be invented, just spotted. As Anders Indset, a world-leading business philosopher, pointed out to me, ‘Jeff Bezos is not using PowerPoints, he’s using storytelling, and people are tapping into that, getting an understanding of the topics, trying to visualize how to explain it. And that’s how a project succeeds, and I’m a strong believer in that.’9

Use SMART objectives

Define objectives that will stick in people’s minds. Since they were first introduced by George T. Doran in 1981,10 SMART objectives have become an essential tool to focus people on what really matters and remove distractions. Every successful project needs at least one clearly articulated objective. As we saw earlier in this chapter, SMART is an acronym for the following five elements.

• Specific: provide the ‘who’ and the ‘what’ of the project.
• Measurable: focus on ‘how much’ the project will produce.
• Action-oriented: trigger practical actions to achieve the project objective.
• Relevant: accurately address the purpose of the project.
• Time-bound: have a time frame indicating when the objective will be met.

The project to deliver the London Olympics in 2012 is a great example of SMART objectives in action. The project’s mission was: ‘To deliver venues, facilities, infrastructure and transport for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games on time, to budget and to leave a lasting legacy.’ The objectives were clearly set out.

• To create infrastructure and facilities associated with Games’ venues to time and agreed budget in accordance with the principles of sustainable development.
• To deliver Olympic and Paralympic venues to time, to design and building specification, and to agreed budget, providing for agreed legacy use.
• To deliver the necessary transport infrastructure for the Games, and devise and implement effective transport plans which provide for legacy use.
• To assist the LDA in the finalization of sustainable legacy plans for the Park and all venues.

Everyone involved in the team working on the Olympics was very clear on what needed to be done, by whom and by when. The result was a project that delivered the infrastructure, on time and on budget, which then enabled a hugely successful Games.