Let’s Stop Hammering Screws

PRINCE2’s Blind Spots: Important Lessons for Program Success

In this updated article, Mentor CEO David Hilliard explains why PRINCE2 and other similar methodologies are not a magic bullet for business-critical program success. The challenge is to do what very few CEOs ever do on a strategic program – deliver it on time and budget by not relying solely on PRINCE2 and taking a different approach. This article was updated from an original published in 2021.

Sarah Blake sat back in her office chair, enjoying a rare moment of reflection after a “full-on” day of wall-to-wall meetings. She glanced at the clock: 18:47, time to go home and spend time with her family.

She felt in control. That morning in the leadership meeting, the traffic lights in the Operational Review were mainly GREEN, and the CFO had assured her that quarterly results were on target.

As she stood up to leave, she spotted her COO approaching her door.

“I wonder what he wants at this time of night?”

“Sarah, we need to talk about Zenith,” he said.

Her heart sank.

Zenith was the codename for their key strategy to drive future growth and innovation. And the news was grim – it was predicted to overspend, be months late, and miss key features.

“How on earth did this happen? After all, we’ve been using PRINCE2 to run this program from the outset.”

With no one to turn to, she struggled to sleep that night, her mind racing.

She had a feeling of déjà vu – the same thing happened to her in her last CEO role.

She called a crisis meeting with her executive team at 08:30 the following day, which confirmed her worst fears. The completion date was now uncertain and the financial hit to the bottom line could be many millions.

“What can we do to recover?” she asked.

The room erupted with forceful voices: intensify recovery efforts, bring in more resources, cut losses.

But Sarah knew from experience – these were just banalities and clichés – empty words.

“I’m not going to let history repeat itself. We can’t rely on a program methodology to dig us out of this hole. This time we’re taking a different approach…”

This sort of speech happens every day somewhere in the world.

Yet, it doesn’t matter what sector you look at; practically all infrastructure programs have large cost overruns and serious delays and don’t come anywhere close to delivering the promised benefits case.

Bent Flyvbjerg, Professor and Inaugural Chair of Major Programme Management at Oxford University recorded in his landmark book “How to Get Big Things Done” that 91.5% of “megaprojects” came in late and over budget.

This observation supports our findings drawn from over 30 years of experience.

In that time, we have led salvage operations on 131 programs. 90% of these were transformation programs that had misfired in under a year, despite the evangelistic use of advanced project management methodologies, like PRINCE2 and PMBOK.

And when these complex programs misfire, senior management tend to agonise about the same things.

Can we fix it? How large will the cost overrun be? How long will the program be delayed – and how short of the target will the benefits case be?

Sarah Blake’s experience was the norm.

Her challenge was to do what very few CEOs ever do on a strategic program – deliver it on time and budget by taking a different approach.

So why is the success rate for these programs so low?

Having worked alongside senior executives and leadership teams over 30 years, the evidence points to the main culprits – management biases and blind spots.

These are both areas where executives can lack awareness or understanding of the fundamentals needed for successful execution.

At best, the issues and associated risks are downplayed, presenting an over-optimistic view of a program’s timetable and without exception a massive under-estimation of the resources required for execution.

Worse, these issues remain hidden, leading to potential risks and oversights that inevitably surface at some point, like unexploded ordnance. These fragilities are always “baked” into a program from the start.

We are encouraged to see that our hands-on experience lines up with the substantial research conducted by Professor Flyvbjerg*.

He has identified the same issues in many different industry sectors that we have come across in Telecoms and IT. His research describes many biases, including three dominant examples we come across constantly:

* Flyvbjerg, Bent, 2021, “Top Ten Behavioral Biases in Project Management: An Overview, ”Project Management Journal, vol. 52, no. 6, pp. 531–546

Operational blind spots 

But it is not all down to management biases! 

Blind spots are equally damaging – we see examples of these on every client assignment. The most common blind spots include:

Is this down to CEO incompetence?

Not at all. Most were intelligent, successful people with exemplary track records. Some ran FTSE 250 companies. Yet, they could never have imagined being in such a difficult situation when their programs were launched.

The bottom line: We are dealing with deep-rooted and unconscious human behaviour, making biases hard to spot.

Managing transformational change is a significant challenge for organisations and their senior executives.

Decision-makers need to better understand the impact of managing change, but the risks are usually downplayed or, in some cases, ignored.

Even the most talented individuals are caught out by blind spots and management biases.

The reasons for these huge expectation gaps have almost nothing to do with the program methodology used, e.g. PMBOK, or PRINCE2

What’s more, Oracle’s Primavera, EcoSys, or any other “cure-all” program management system also appear to have zero impact on success.

Better program management standards are good news. But let’s be frank, while certification courses are good news, they haven’t done nearly enough to improve program successes.

Part of the solution must be to strike a more pragmatic balance between theoretical book learning and the gritty reality of working at the coal face.

Most experienced practitioners would cringe if they heard students can reach advanced competency levels in PRINCE2 and PMBOK, with books and online teaching, in as little as two weeks. And students can bring textbooks into the exams with them.

It’s hard to imagine a two-week course in accounting is adequate for a CFO to learn his craft. A CFO would need to build experience and acumen over time, in many different situations. Unfortunately, this comparison is a pretty accurate picture of what happens in many program management situations.

Can you remember the last time you met a CFO with two weeks experience? Absurd, isn’t it?

Does this mean we should abandon program management methodologies?

No, it doesn’t.

It means professional bodies need to do much more to raise education and training standards and learn how to integrate these with gritty practical experience.

And businesses need to be more realistic about the shortcomings of these certifications when hiring people.

Methodologies definitely help teams think through what they have to do – yet on their own, they are not a magic bullet.

At best, they are a fairly narrow guide—a model for approaching a program—mainly from a process and checklist standpoint.

At worst, they are like placebos. Yet many CEOs and companies believe the methodologies are a universal success remedy that work like a strong antibiotic.

In truth, they create an inflated sense of confidence and security.

“Have you got a program management manual?”

Client: “Yes, we do!”

David: “Do you use it?”

Client: “No, because it’s peppered with excessive red tape and pointless bureaucracy. We have a copy somewhere but I haven’t seen it for a while. Let me see if I can find one for you.”

This vignette is not at all rare. It tells you many companies actually run programs “freestyle” – and deploy people who think they “know” how to do it.

Methodologies must be driven by very experienced people. They should be skilled – not just in program management – but also in the specific type of program the business is thinking about.

The delays, overspends and battered benefit cases just keep coming

A business may have previously been 100% successful on a software program – and still manage to make a complete mess of, say, a network rollout – because they don’t make a clear distinction between the characteristics of the two.

Each program demands different domain knowledge, leadership skills, and experience.

And while there are many great people and pockets of success in every sector, we are not seeing any striking improvements in program performance, across the board.

The delays, overspends and shattered benefit cases just keep coming.

Things still fall apart – and this should ring alarm bells loudly. There’s something really wrong here.

Improving performance on complex programs

Almost without exception, certified program managers and methodologies were used in every program Mentor has been involved with in the last three decades.

Yet, even with committed people, strong functional skills, and methodologies, these programs still became high-profile turnaround situations – all in desperate need of emergency surgery and intensive care.

Even if there had been total compliance with a program methodology, there would still have been fatal execution gaps. Simply because these methodologies are just models. Models are just representation and, by definition, are incomplete. They pay scant attention to crucial elements that really do make the difference between winning and losing – the people and cultural issues.

For clients, it was always a tale of woe. To have a show-stopper come out of the woodwork late in the day was always distressing for any program team. Most businesses were almost a year into these programs before the execution cracks became so large, they couldn’t be ignored anymore.

Although eventually each turnaround was successful, it took a lot of hard work. There are no quick and “easy-on-the-pocket” turnarounds. The damage was already done. The seeds of failure were sown at the start.

Programs misfire for human/people reasons, not tools and methodologies

To find some answers, we dug into the reasons why these 100+ programs became turnaround candidates in the first place.

We noticed two significant things.

  1. No program failed for technical reasons, and…
  2. No program had gone off the rails because it did not follow a program lifecycle model, like PRINCE2.

Yet, when we deconstructed each program, we discovered something more fascinating – they had all misfired for human/people reasons – factors which have almost nothing to do with tools and methodologies.

Management teams seemed unaware of how their own cognitive biases, prejudices, limiting beliefs, old wives’ tales, and behaviours impact program success.

The failure patterns fall into six distinct areas

We grouped the failure patterns into six distinct areas. It quickly became apparent that each program had misfired because there were big holes in several areas.

In most cases, it was in all six areas: Alignment, Planning, Organisation, Suppliers, Dependencies, and Culture.

The cumulative impact of these omissions and oversights meant failure had been “designed-in” to all of the programs. Some type of misfortune was inevitable.

We have covered these topics extensively in our “Don’t Drop the Ball” Insight Guide.

The importance of pinpointing issues early on

So, if we know at least one – and probably more – of these six factors, crop up on every program, shouldn’t we do more to pinpoint and trap the issues as early as we can?

This gives us the best possible chance of managing them effectively.

Let me emphasise, I do not believe any company sets out to screw up a program. Quite the reverse. Most people work incredibly hard to do a first-rate job.

Yet, in the complex world of program management, we don’t yet have all the tools we need to do this.

There’s still far too much guesswork and speculation involved.

The tools we have are good, as far as they go – but they are not smart enough to deal with the biases, impulses, instincts, and nuances of people’s behaviour. On their own, program methodologies fall short.

The statistics make this crystal clear.

Avoid Program Methodology shortfalls with an Independent Program Review

We have created a brand-new way of helping clients to deliver important programs – by cracking these people-related and cultural problems upfront.

Our Independent Program Review makes sure you avoid the pitfalls of management biases and human behavioural factors that program methodologies fail to address.

With a modest investment of time and money, you can benefit from a rapid assessment of the probability that your program will succeed before it reaches a critical stage.

We will work with you to identify potential issues your internal teams might miss, preventing costly setbacks and delays.

Independent Program Reviews make all the difference.

Here’s why:

  • Spot Issues Early: An external, unbiased review intercepts potential problems that internal teams often miss. By addressing these issues early, you can prevent them from escalating into costly delays and overspends.
  • Boost Team Performance: Independent reviewers bring a fresh perspective and can offer solutions to improve team dynamics, reducing the stress and pressure that leads to dysfunction and conflict.
  • Cost-Effective Investment: The cost of an independent review is modest, compared to the potential savings. Avoiding a massive program overspend can save your company significant resources and, more importantly, prevent the pain associated with prolonged delays.
  • Proven Results: Companies that have adopted Independent Program Reviews report improved program outcomes, timely delivery, and better budget adherence.

You will get the results in weeks

Independent Program Reviews can be run at any time during the lifecycle of a business-critical program. The process is fast, easy, and accurate in its diagnosis and prognosis. It uses a blend of AI technology and our own practitioner’s experience to provide an accurate analysis of the program’s status.

In under two weeks, you will gain a clear understanding of the remedial actions, required skills, and realistic timelines to increase your confidence in achieving your program’s goals.

One week later we will give you a management presentation and analysis of your program and suggest a strong plan for improvement.

You will then better understand your organisation’s management biases and blind spots – and recognise areas that require strengthening to boost your team’s performance.

We understand that bringing in outside experts can seem daunting. However, our team of seasoned professionals is dedicated to working collaboratively with your existing teams, ensuring that the review process is insightful, smooth, and ultimately beneficial.

With this insight, it’s far easier to flush-out problems in the early stages of a program, without holding your breath for six months, or even longer, waiting for them to surface.

Gain over 100 times the value of your investment

By tackling problems that consistently cause delays and overspending in business-critical programs, you will typically gain at least 10 times the value of your investment. But, given the substantial financial dimensions of most business-critical programs, the return on your investment is more likely to be 100 times or more.

Achieve what CEOs rarely do & beat the odds

At the beginning of this story, the reason the CEO’s team could not provide the confidence she needed was very simple.

Despite using PRINCE2, the program had clearly missed the mark in all six areas that underpin program success: alignment, planning, organisation, suppliers, dependencies, and culture.

Had Sarah commissioned an Independent Program Review, she would have foreseen potential failures caused by biases and human behaviour. This would have allowed for preventative measures, avoiding the issues that led to her difficult conversation with the COO.

And she would have avoided an even tougher time coming up with a credible story to explain this to the Board and stakeholders.

So, whether you’ve already launched your program or are just about to, relying on program methodologies alone is not the answer.

I’d be happy to discuss how investing in an Independent Program Review will safeguard your program’s success.

You can email me at David.hilliard@mentoreurope.com or call 0118 359 2444.

*Bent Flyvbjerg, 2021, “Top Ten Behavioral Biases In Project Management”

About the author

David Hilliard is Founder of Mentor, execution specialists in strategic program execution.