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REASONABLE EXPECTATIONS

Posted By Digital Enterprise Society, 3 hours ago
Updated: Tuesday, November 2, 2021


REASONABLE EXPECTATIONS

 



Author: Mark Pendergast

 

Selling a Digital Transformation project is really hard. There are just so many
unknowns and the goals are fuzzy at best. The good news is that most Leadership
teams are all about improvement and maybe even transformation, but often the
project team and the Leadership are not aligned on expectations.

 

Leadership may come to you and say we need to pursue Digital Transformation to
stay competitive. You run out and develop a 5-year plan to completely transform
the company. When you present this plan back to Leadership, they look at you
like you are crazy and shoo you out of the room. What happened? Their
expectations of Digital Transformation were a quick three-month update of the
company website and a simple online catalog. Your expectations were not
aligned with theirs, so you did not connect – in fact you came across as out of
touch and even dangerous.

 

I know this because I had one of these experiences early in my career. I was so
excited that leadership had faith in me to develop the plan that I neglected to
get their expectations. I took what I knew about the business and our challenges
and developed a ten-year plan to address everything. It was millions of dollars
and touched almost every facet of the business. Well, they were looking for
something much less comprehensive. I never did find out what they wanted, but it
was clearly not anything like what I presented.

 

Even when Leadership is clear about what they want, they may not be ready for
the result. I recall a huge effort based on the principles of “Reengineering the
Corporation” that was chartered by the Board of Directors and staffed with a
team of a hundred. They collected data and analyzed all the angles and came up
with what I thought were very good recommendations. When they presented
to Leadership, their recommendations were rejected, the team was disbanded, and
several people were told that their services were no longer needed. What went
wrong? The team focused on the fact that Leadership was too involved in the
day-to-day operations and needed to disengage and focus on strategy, like
executives were supposed to do. This was not the Leaderships’ expectation. I am
sure that they expected to hear how the worker bees would improve their
productivity and quality by being better organized and maybe getting a new IT
system. Obviously getting the executives out of the worker bees 'way was not an
acceptable plan in their eyes. 

 

In each of these examples the Digital Transformation effort failed because there
was a mismatch of expectations. The Leadership had a great vision of what they
wanted and condensed it down to the phrase “Digital Transformation”. The team,
or me, assumed they knew what Digital Transformation meant and provided a plan.
A lot of wasted effort could have been saved, and progress made, if the words
Digital Transformation had been unpacked a little before execution.

Now I really feel like being defensive, and taking a page from
Philip Crosbie’s “Quality is Free”, and say that 80% of the problem is on
the Leadership side because they are supposed to be the adults in the room
and they were unclear on communicating their expectations. However true this may
be, it is really not an excuse. We all know that even Leaders with great vision,
that are very good at selling their vision, are busy guys (or gals). They don’t
have time to attend to all the details and unfortunately, they assume their
vision is obvious to everyone.

 

So, how do we address this problem? How do we get down to the specifics before
we run out and really get down to the details?

 

My solution has been to develop what I call “Victory Conditions”. Victory
conditions are some simple statements about what we want to have when we are
done. Probably less than a dozen of them. They are high level statements of what
we will be able to do when we successfully complete the activity.

These are negotiated with the Leadership as part of the Initiation Phase of the
project (or ideally even before the project exists.) They serve several purposes
– the most important is to ensure common expectations of what we will have when
we are done. Other benefits are that they provide a framework to negotiate
scope conflicts, and they also provide a guide to what ‘done’ looks like. 

 

The actual negotiation is probably the most valuable part because it takes some
real thought to sum up a project in a few simple sentences. If you start getting
into the second page, you are not doing it right. Victory Conditions are a dozen
key things that absolutely must happen. Not the nice to haves; not the like to
haves; not even the important; but the we would die without them. Just the
things that would be show-stoppers if they did not happen – no workarounds
available, no plan B – must haves.

When I led a major PLM project, we negotiated victory
conditions. For example: We had to create parts with the same attributes as the
mainframe and with attribute validation; We needed to create Bills of Materials
with content validation. We needed to send them to the ERP system with
guaranteed delivery. We needed an API to import BOMs from CAD. The system needed
to be responsive. The system needed to be available. We needed training for
the Engineers. That simple list was my contract with my Executive Champion. Yes,
we had a hundred-page requirements document and all sorts of suggestions on
improvements, but the Victory Conditions were our North Star, our must-do list.

 

As we gathered the requirements, we kept an eye on the Victory Conditions. If it
was not in direct support of victory, the requirement went on the nice to have
pile. If we could fit it in, great, but it was expendable if we got behind, or
we would work to pick it up in phase 2. This really helped us focus and led most
discussions of late additions to be short and sweet. 

 

When it came time to accept the system at the end, the Victory Conditions came
to our rescue again. Can we ship BOMs to the Mainframe -yes or no? I know you
would like to add some attributes to the BOM lines. It would be nice to have an
approval workflow. It would be great to have direct transfer to a socket on the
mainframe. But NO, these are not required to meet the Victory Conditions. Please
sign off that the system is ready, and we are victorious.

 

In the end, you achieve victory by ensuring what you delivered aligns with that
hazy picture in the mind of the Leadership. I included the review of
the Victory Conditions in every weekly review. This served two purposes. One,
the Victory Conditions were always clear in mind. We never ‘forgot’ what we
needed to do. Second, the Victory Conditions were always up to date. Yes, the
Victory Conditions can change due to new business conditions or changes
in Leadership priority. We were occasionally impacted by major events and had to
change direction. Some examples I have seen are recessions that required
cutbacks, acquisitions or divestitures that required a detour to support
them, and even conflicts with other projects like the six-month detour that was
required to support an SAP deployment to our division.

 

I recall an old joke that really helped me focus on Expectations. There was a
team exploring a vast jungle and they were struggling to get through the
underbrush. The Leader climbed a nearby tall tree to see where they were. He
looked around and shouted down “Hey, were in the wrong jungle”. The project
manager shouted back up. “That’s not important, were making good progress.” This
is a crisis of mismatched expectations. 

 

I am curious if I am the only victim of mismatched expectations in a
Transformation Project? Is this a big deal or are most projects clear as
crystal? Does mismatch of expectations contribute to the high failure rate
of Transformation projects, or does it kill them before they even get started?
Let me know in the comments.

 

 

AUTHOR: MARK PENDERGAST

Digital Guideposts is written by Mark Pendergast – retired Data Junkie, Deep
Thinker and Innovator. He worked with product data for over 30 years of his
41-year career in Automotive Components Manufacturing. His background includes
work in Engineering, Operations and Information Technology. He is also an
Electrical and Computer Engineer (BS-ECE) and a Certified Project Management
Professional (PMP). In his spare time, he Mentors a High School FIRST Robotics
Team, reads and plays on his computer.

 

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