When hiring a Project Director, Producer, or Project or Programme Manager one of the main things that people often look for is someone who is “a safe pair of hands” – someone who won’t screw up. Complex projects (such as digital projects) can look pretty scary to a stakeholder or client, and a lot of people are frightened that they might fail.
Trying to avoid failure is good in one regard. Obviously the project itself must not fail.
But people should not fear that individual tasks will fail. Indeed, a water-tight project plan will allow for the possibility that any individual component of the project might fail. Accidents happen in the best regulated families, as the saying goes.
Once you accept that task failure is acceptable, as long as it doesn’t jeopardise the project, then life gets much more interesting….
It is perfectly possible to build a successful project on the basis that most of the early stage tasks will actually fail. One of my most successful projects (in terms of over-delivering on client expectations) started off with a plan where 60% of the total listed tasks were expected to fail: it sounds counter-intuitive, and it was pretty complicated to operate, and I’ve had people – usually non-project-managers – tell me to my face that it couldn’t possibly have worked… but we knocked 12% off the schedule and a third off the cost without sacrificing quality or scope, so the results spoke for themselves.
High-risk tasks are where lots of great things can happen. They are where you test the limitations of technology, where you trial new partners, where you let your people try to break new ground. If there is an 80% chance that a high-risk task will fail, then that is absolutely fine – so long as that failure has no impact on the success of the project, and there is a chance that the task will deliver a big benefit.
These are tasks that fall out of conversations like… “this probably isn’t possible, but wouldn’t it be ****ing awesome if we could…” or “he seems like a really good guy, but he has never done this before – do we have anything to lose if we let him try it?” or “the audio’s fine, but maybe, just maybe, dynamic audio could really increase the emotional impact – how do we find out?” or “this team has no track record, but that is a seriously stunning demo – how can we find out what they can do on a live project?” Etc. When these tasks deliver, you find that you can do something that most people consider impossible, that your team member has strengths you weren’t tapping into, that a new technical trick delivers a real punch, that you now have a great new partner, and so on.
In short, tasks that are likely to fail are where you learn, where you push boundaries and expand your capabilities.
But normal business pressures often mean that you can’t try high-risk tasks, that you can’t push yourself. Your deadline is short, your resources are fixed, your client is nervous, the stakeholders are eating up your time, and the management team or project board are easily spooked by anything that can’t be sold to them in ten seconds. What do you do?
The business needs to get into the habit of taking these sorts of risks. This needs to become a normal way of working. Otherwise, if high-risk tasks are seen as exceptional and unnecessary, they will either get cut from the plan, or they’ll stay in on paper but will have no support (and will thus be doomed to fail). On the other hand, if they are accepted as normal, legitimate parts of projects then they will be pursued seriously and frequently enough that they will sometimes yield fine fruit.
That is why, I would argue, every project should have a line item for Failure. It should be a requirement of starting a project. Have we identified high-risk activities that we can fail at and learn from? Are we spending enough of our budget on these? Are they the right tasks? These activities are not an excuse for people to canter around on their favoured hobby-horses: the Failure line item should get the same level of intelligent scrutiny, and be weighed with equal importance as, any other part of the project.
Even if the Failure line items accounts for only 5% of a project’s budget, the habit of pushing boundaries is a very constructive one.
When high-risk tasks are expected to be on every plan, then the business gets used to challenging itself, gets used to learning and pushing what it can do. In this way, teams and businesses alike become more capable.
