When it comes to projects people are passionate about, saying no is hard to do, especially if your organization is a nonprofit. All things are about doing good. How do you say no to anything?
When I was a consultant, one of our customers was a rapidly growing financial market data provider[1]. They had recently completed a buyout of the firm from its former European parent organization. They were having a hard time delivering new and enhanced products, and meeting project deadlines. The President of the company described the issue as "not so much having a big enough pipeline of projects, but having any come out the other side of the pipe." Interviews with product managers and senior managers identified a desire to have a product development structure that delivered completed projects in a timely fashion.
What we did was help develop a workable product management methodology. Part of this was adopting a set of decision rules we called "yardsticks", and prioritization of a long project list.
The goal of developing a company's yardsticks is to enable managers and staff at all levels to (a) make decisions about projects and activities with a more senior management mind-set, and (b) to constructively question all projects and activities to assess whether they are aligned with the firm's key bets, or strategic goals. When the goals and rules of the game clear, it is possible for teams to be empowered to accomplish objectives with a high sense of mission and ownership.
When then developed a detailed project list of all active and planned product development activities. Projects were classified into five categories, such as "revenue projects," "infrastructure projects," and "custom client requests." Product and Engineering managers were then asked to estimate the time and people needed to complete each step within the projects. From these estimates, we developed a model to forecast the implied people resources required on a quarter-by-quarter basis to complete each project within its expected time-frame.
In a full day meeting with senior managers and the product managers we ran a "Post-It" note exercise to (a) gain a clear sense of the magnitude and timing of the product development activities, and (b) to "re-sequence" projects so that the higher priority items could be completed near-term with the available resources. Different color Post-It notes were used for each project to indicate the originating department (Marketing or Engineering) and type of project (revenue generating, cost savings, revenue retention and longer-term bets). The Post-It notes were arranged on flip-charts where each one represented a different calendar quarter, extending out three years.
It was immediately apparent that an inordinate number of the projects were clustered in the first quarter. In addition, our model suggested that a doubling of the Engineering and Marketing staffs would be required to complete them. Staffing up this amount was not an option.
So the next step involved managers negotiating with each other to move projects out to future quarters. At each juncture, we recalculated the implied resources, and encouraged managers to make the tough decisions on delaying more projects in order to live within their allotted resources.
At the end of the day, the group had reached consensus about the priority of the projects and their timing. The exercise allowed them to reschedule the project list without losing any, so that the probability of completing near-term projects was vastly improved.
Notice what happened. None of the projects was lost. Everyone could see their favorite project on the flipcharts. It's just that some were deferred to a later phase in a later quarter. This method of deferral and sequencing projects, to "live within your means," meant saying "yes" to the priority projects; it did not mean having to say "no" to any projects. This works for non-profit as well as for-profit organizations, especially when all projects were for the good of the client. |