Undercooked: How to handle poorly sized projects

Sometimes you’ll go for a role or be briefed on a project and told it’s just a minor upgrade, or a light refresh, or a small process change, or a few roles impacted. Then when you get into the actual organisation or onto the actual project, you realise it’s been severely undercooked and it’s actually going to take a lot more change effort than you originally thought. That basic Enterprise Resource Platform (ERP) you were told is just swapping the legacy system to the new solution actually requires a complete overhaul of processes, roles, capabilities, customer experience and rebuild of culture, ways of working and operating rhythms. Those 12 updates to an enterprise agreement will in reality affect 100,000 people’s pay, along with the system used to calculate and distribute that. That “simple” system upgrade has suddenly downed the whole operations and neither customers nor team can book, order, make or get updates, or communicate with each other. It happens and it happens often, so knowing how to handle poorly sized projects that are woefully undercooked is a skill and an art all Change Managers should muster and master. 

Why do projects get undercooked?

First, why it happens. I think it’s really important to understand the conditions that might have occurred to cause the project to be sized so poorly. Not only does this help you work out what to do to get it properly sized and back on track, it can also help ease confusion and frustration and provide fodder for convincing Sponsors, Project Managers and Business Leaders of appropriate resourcing, support and due diligence for the project. 

Here’s a few reasons I’ve seen:

Fudging the numbers to get the business case signed off: in the worst of cases, the scale and scope of a project and its impacts and timeline are deliberately undercooked to make the business case more appealing for sign off. If the project looks like it’s just a little initiative that won’t take too much time, effort or money, it’s more likely to get the green light.

No Project Manager: I’ve worked on too many projects where there is literally no Project Manager or the “project manager” is just a Business Analyst, HR specialist, or internal leader who has absolutely no project management expertise or experience. This often happens when projects are initiated by a business unit or division instead of from an IT or Transformation division, but many small changes and system upgrades are seen as too rats and mice to have a dedicated Project Manager.

Sweet-talking salespeople: Too often I’ve seen technology vendors spout nonsense that their system is so best practice and intuitive and their development team so skilled that the transition to their new solution will be smooth as silk and require no business engagement, minimal process mapping and improvement, little communications and training, and a morsel of effort for go live. You’ll be able to switch it on and fly away into the sunset. This is complete rubbish and contributes to why many projects feel they don’t need a dedicated and experienced Project Manager so these critical steps aren’t even part of the plan.

Delusional IT teams: I love IT teams and I’ve worked with many in my years leading change on digital transformations, but they are often overly ambitious when it comes to effort and time required, and in some cases flippantly oblivious to no-brainers like work breakdown structures, regression testing, solution architecture, and root cause analysis. I remember watching the IT team of an early project who had constantly missed their own self-imposed milestones and delayed the project by some weeks, then have the gall to celebrate that they had stayed up all night with pizza and soft drink and snacks getting the technical development finished in time for go live at 9.00am. If they had scoped properly and been more realistic then they shouldn’t have had to pull an all-nighter… 

Lack of experience with scoping projects: Then there’s the projects that genuinely don’t know how to scope the impact of their change because they’ve never done it before or they can’t consider all the things that will be required or could go wrong. 

I’m sure there’s other reasons why projects get undercooked, but these are the main ones I’ve seen time and again with the projects and clients I’ve worked with or around. 

How do you handle poorly sized projects?

Next, what to do about it. If you’re a Change Manager or Change Management Consultant and you’ve landed on an undercooked project, here’s what you can do to remediate and get the proper support, resourcing, timeline and budget for the project to make sure the change is successful:

Use a Change Manager at business case development: If possible, try to be included during business case development to help the project/business understand the true complexity, scale and effort the project will require from project resources AND business resources so they don’t whitewash the business case. While it’s often harder for internal Change Managers to get a seat at the table this early, good projects will hire in a Change Management Consultant to support set up and kick off, then bring them back or hire in Change resources for implementation.

Challenge delicately: Take the time to scope the change, map the stakeholders and assess the impacts. I don’t usually show my Impact Assessment to anyone but if there’s glaring risks I’ll show these to whoever’s in charge so they can see that the thing they thought was tiny is actually inherently risky. Ask lots of questions and challenging people nicely with things like, “Oh, what would happen if that was to happen? What would customers experience and what would they do? Oh okay. They wouldn't be able to actually place orders for three days. We would lose three days’ worth of revenue? Oh, okay. Are we comfortable with losing $3 million worth of revenue?”

Advocate for a business-focused Project Manager: When a technology vendor says they’ll handle the development and delivery so the client doesn’t need to hire a Project Manager, understand that they mean the client doesn’t need to hire a TECHNICAL Project Manager i.e. to manage the technology development. Projects still need a Project Manager to handle the internal business side of the project (and potentially the external customer/client/community side) to do things like business engagement, process improvement, and customer readiness. Encourage and help them hire the right type of Project Manager if the project doesn’t have a proper experienced PM (again, this is so much easier to influence when you’re a Change Management Consultant, and can be harder if you’re an internal Change resource).

Understand that scale automatically creates complexity: A simple system upgrade in an organisation of 100,000 people is automatically complex because of the sheer scale and the efforts in managing the potential risks of the people and corresponding systems, processes and ways of working that can be affected. The smallest of changes can have big consequences the more people it impacts, so any change affecting over 1,000 people at once needs to be considered somewhat complex. And remember - customers, clients and community are impacted stakeholders too! So even if your organisation only has a few hundred employees, you might have thousands of customers so a change that impacts them is automatically complex.

Check how matrixed the organisation is: In other cases, your scoping of the change may include which teams work together, which may not correspond to reporting lines. Again, a change that impacts matrixed operations is likely to be automatically complex.

Encourage and upskill your project and/or IT team: If your project or IT team aren’t scoping, sizing and planning properly on an ongoing basis, you might need to upskill them or advocate for expert support to help them learn how to do things like work breakdown structures, effort estimates, regression testing, solution architecture, root cause analysis, product verification testing and more otherwise you’ll constantly be chasing your tails. Sometimes with consulting clients I’ll come and do project resets, ways of working capability builds, agile fundamentals training, etc to help the project scope and deliver better.

And there you have it - why and how to handle poorly sized projects with finesse and success!

Lata xx

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