Your project is reporting green. Is it actually healthy?

Sometimes the staff kitchen tells you more than the status report.

One of the first things I notice in a struggling technology project is how the team looks.

Stressed. You can pick it up sitting in the staff kitchen, before you’ve opened a report.

That doesn’t tell me exactly what is wrong. It does tell me there’s something worth asking about. When the people delivering a project look under strain, while the reporting says everything is progressing nicely, I want to understand the gap.

If your project is only green because your people are running themselves into the ground, it isn’t healthy.

That’s a useful starting point for a project health check.

I joined Vicki Abraham on the Business Women Australia Podcast to discuss project health checks, discovery and early intervention in technology transformation.

The conversation is called Project Health Checks Preventing Tech Transformation Disasters. Watch it here.

For leaders wondering whether their project needs a closer look, here’s how I think about it.

Green against what?

A project status report has a job to do. We need visibility of progress, expenditure, milestones and risks. But we also need to understand what sits behind the status.

A schedule might be holding because people are compensating for unresolved problems. A deliverable might be complete while the people expected to use it still have different ideas about what it should achieve.

Those are different kinds of information.

I want to know whether the sponsor and project team share an understanding of what success means, what is getting in the way and which decisions need attention. I also want to know whether the organisation can operate and support what the project is delivering.

A green indicator needs enough context to be useful.

The team is part of the evidence

If I see stress, I ask questions:

• Is there too much work?

• Are priorities competing?

• Are people waiting for decisions, working with unclear expectations or trying to reconcile different instructions?

• Is the team raising concerns? What happens when they do?

People can be working hard on a healthy project. They can also be carrying an unhealthy project through effort that isn’t visible to anyone approving its next milestone.

The kitchen conversation gives me a reason to investigate. It needs to be considered alongside the plans, financial position, risks and delivery evidence.

What has become “normal” on your project?

• Explaining the same unresolved issue again and again?

• Working around decisions that never arrive?

• Taking on responsibilities that have no clear owner?

  
  

These are useful places to start asking questions. A health check gives us an opportunity to examine those arrangements before we ask people to keep delivering within them.

What a project health check actually looks at

At TEC, we tailor the approach to what the organisation needs.

What we typically examine:

• Financial position

• Scope

• Schedule

• People

• Outcomes

• Risk

• Procurement & vendor management

• The solution

The focus and depth depend on what the organisation needs. The value comes from looking at how those dimensions interact. A scope decision affects the schedule. Procurement arrangements shape what can be changed and how. A solution choice affects the support people will need. The pace of delivery affects whether the organisation has capacity to adopt the result. Looking at each in isolation can leave important connections unexplored.

The questions and depth of the work depend on the situation. We don’t assume every organisation needs the same review, the same report or the same level of ongoing support.

Sometimes a short, sharp report is useful. It can give leaders a clear assessment and practical decisions to work through. Sometimes the need is for an embedded trusted advisor to the project sponsor, helping make sense of the situation as it develops. The approach should fit the decisions the organisation needs to make.

Join up the sponsor and the team

Part of our role can be improving communication between the project sponsor and the project team.

Both may care deeply about the outcome while seeing very different parts of the problem.

The sponsor needs to understand the choices, consequences and organisational implications. The team needs clear direction, timely decisions and an understanding of what matters most. If those conversations aren’t connecting, adding more detail to the reporting may leave the underlying problem untouched.

I want to help them establish a shared picture: what are we trying to achieve, where are we now and what needs to happen next? That creates a better basis for decisions than everyone racing ahead with a slightly different understanding.

First, breathe

When a project is distressed, my first response is to encourage everyone to breathe.

There’s often pressure to do something immediately. Add meetings. Request more reporting. Tighten the schedule. Find someone to fix it.

Where action is urgent, take it. Alongside that, we need enough space to establish what we’re responding to.

Before racing, find a shared direction:

• What outcome are we working towards?

• What is actually happening now?

• What do we agree on?

• Where do our understandings differ?

That shared understanding gives us something to build on.

Without a shared understanding, we can put a great deal of energy into solving different problems.

Discovery has a practical purpose

Discovery gives us room to establish what needs to change, how work currently happens and what delivery will require. It’s worth doing before we commit significant money and organisational energy. It can also become necessary again when a project is struggling or assumptions have changed.

The discovery question

Do we understand enough to make the next decision responsibly?

There will still be uncertainty. We can identify it, decide what needs investigating and be explicit about the assumptions we’re making. That is more useful than letting different assumptions travel unnoticed through a project.

Turn the findings into decisions

A review is useful when people can act on it.

A useful review should help you answer

• What needs attention first?

• Who needs to decide?

• What support does the team need?

• What can realistically change within the available capacity?

If the findings become a long list of additional tasks for an already stretched team, we need to think harder about implementation. An independent perspective can help people see connections and discuss difficult issues. It should lead to clearer choices and a workable way forward. That is what I care about in advisory work: helping the sponsor and team understand the situation, communicate better and make decisions they can carry through.

TL;DR: The anti-consultant take

If the project is green and the people look wrecked, ask some questions.

Read the reports. Talk to the team. Find out what it takes to keep those milestones moving.

Before everyone races off to fix things, breathe. Agree what you’re trying to achieve and what is actually happening.

Then choose the support that helps. That might be a short, sharp health check. It might be someone alongside the sponsor, helping connect the decisions with the reality of delivery.

Make the findings usable. Give people direction and the capacity to act.

Watch the conversation

For more on independent reviews, discovery and early intervention, watch Project Health Checks Preventing Tech Transformation Disasters with Vicki Abraham and me on the Business Women Australia Podcast.

Thank you to Vicki and the Business Women Australia team for the conversation.

If you’re sponsoring a technology transformation and want a clearer picture of its health, get in touch with TEC. We can work through the approach that fits your organisation.

What tells you more about a project’s health than its status report?