Project Effectiveness

We've been undertaking a study of project risk in airlines and airport projects. Not unusual you might say, however we're not looking at the specific risks of given projects - rather the nature of identifying systemic risks and how to identify them while you're in the project.

One of our findings is that the reporting chain from project members up to the project sponsor is a key cause of information not getting up to the sponsor. A process inhibiting exactly what it was designed to do! You're not shocked? No, we've all been there haven't we.

When looking at the phenomenon more closely, we found it has very little to do with wrong doing - intentionally hiding critical information. Most often, it's the summary reports and project reviews themselves that limit the effectiveness of risk assessment.

In one very clear case, we found a project review included twelve groups - and this was a very well-managed project. Each group understood their tasks, deliverable and due dates, dependencies of work among participants and the overall plan. However if one group was behind their own schedule, they didn't report it because they 'knew' another group in the chain would be hitting a delay and they'd have more time. What happened in this project was that when the final deliverable was going to be over 6 months late, a project audit found out that over 180 items was behind schedule and each of the 12 groups had significant delays.

We're working to develop a method to get objective reports from the entire project staff and help reduce this phenomenon substantially. We would be interested in any of your views?