Recognition Isn’t Enough

In my previous article, The Numbers Never Tell the Whole Story, I argued that major programs begin telling their story long before the financial numbers do.

By the time costs begin to rise, milestones start slipping or confidence begins to drain away, the warning signs have often been visible for months. The numbers simply catch up with reality.

That article described how, over many years, we came to recognise recurring patterns across major programs. Different organisations, industries and technologies often produced remarkably similar execution conditions.

That was an important breakthrough. For the first time, we had a structured way of recognising those conditions before they became financial outcomes.

But recognition alone did not change the outcome.

Over time, we made a second discovery.

Recognising the patterns was only the first half of the challenge. The harder question was what an organisation should do once those patterns had been recognised.

Recognition was only the beginning

Every major program runs into problems. There has probably never been one delivered exactly as originally planned.

Assumptions prove optimistic. Dependencies become more difficult than expected. Suppliers fall out of step. Decisions arrive late. Circumstances change.

That is simply the nature of major programs.

The leadership challenge is deciding which issues matter enough to change the way the program is being run.

Every major program eventually reaches a point where continuing with the original plan and protecting the original plan become two different things.

Recognising that moment matters.

Responding to it determines the outcome.

The leadership dilemma

By the time serious execution problems have been recognised, the program team is usually working flat out to deliver the original commitment.

Customers are waiting. Deadlines have been agreed. Investors expect progress. The Board expects delivery.

The people with the greatest experience, authority and credibility are already fully committed to keeping the program moving.

Ironically, they are often the same people needed to remove the obstacles now threatening it.

That creates one of the hardest leadership decisions in major program delivery.

Do you keep your strongest people focused on today’s delivery, or move them onto the problems that may prevent tomorrow’s delivery from happening?

Most organisations understand this dilemma perfectly well.

This is rarely a failure of diagnosis. It is usually a conscious leadership decision.

The core team stays focused on the original plan. The newly identified problems are dealt with alongside the main effort or passed to people with more time but less authority, experience or understanding of how the program really works.

The reasoning is understandable. Nobody wants to slow the program down. The hope is that the problems can be resolved without disturbing delivery.

Sometimes they can.

On major programs, they often cannot.

The problems remain. Dependencies accumulate. Suppliers continue working to different assumptions. Decisions become harder.

Gradually, the organisation loses the progress it was trying to protect.

This may explain why organisations often under-respond even when they understand both the problem and what needs to be done.

The issue is rarely a lack of understanding.

It is a decision about priorities and where to place scarce capability.

One of the hardest leadership decisions in any major program is accepting that the people you most need to keep delivering the plan may also be the people you need to take off the plan in order to save it.

Moving those people may slow the program for a time.

Leaving them where they are can slow it much more.

From recognition to judgement

Looking back across more than thirty years of major program recovery, I now see this as one of the clearest signs of future difficulty.

Failure is not inevitable.

But the organisation has recognised the problem without changing the way the program is being run.

Recognition without effective intervention changes nothing.

That realisation changed our own thinking.

The Mentor Execution Index gave us a disciplined way of recognising recurring execution conditions. It brought together evidence that already existed across leadership teams, delivery organisations and major suppliers.

It answered one important question:

What is happening inside the program?

But it left another unanswered:

Given everything we now know, is the response strong enough to change the outcome?

That question became the foundation of today’s Independent Program Review.

Its purpose is not simply to identify execution problems. It is to judge whether the leadership response, the execution model and the people assigned to the problem are capable of delivering the original ambition.

Sometimes the answer is reassuring.

Sometimes it shows that the organisation needs to change course while it still has choices.

Looking back now, I think the two discoveries belong together.

The first taught us that major programs begin telling their story long before the numbers do.

The second taught us that recognising that story is only the beginning.

The numbers do not determine the outcome.

Recognition does not determine the outcome.

Leadership decisions do.

That is the real purpose of an Independent Program Review: to help leadership decide whether the current response is strong enough to change the outcome while there is still time to act.

 

About the author

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