The study, being conducted by Vital Smarts Inc., a Provo, Utah-based training firm, found that project managers' inability to talk to people about five often-occurring negative situations frequently leads to failure. The preliminary findings were made public Tuesday at Delivering Project Excellence, a conference for project managers.
According to David Maxfield, director of research at Vital Smarts, the five situations include the following:
-- Setting arbitrary deadlines and inadequate resources that "set up a project to fail."
-- Failing to provide the necessary leadership, political clout or energy for a project.
-- Skirting or manipulating the project priority-setting process.
-- An unwillingness by team members to support projects as required.
-- Failing to acknowledge project problems until it's too late for remedial action.
About 150 project managers in the audience supported the findings with numerous comments and a show of hands, indicating that they confront such situations regularly.
Maxfield reported that surveys and interviews of more than 800 project managers, as well as 150 hours of observations of corporate project activities, indicated that 80 percent of project managers routinely face arbitrary deadlines and inadequate resources that have no relationship to reality and only 18 percent who feel they can confront that situation effectively.
Maxfield pointed to the key difference between those who don't confront arbitrary deadlines and those who do: Those who don't "think of all the bad things that will happen if they stand up to their boss," he said. Those who do talk about their concerns "think of all the bad things that will happen if they don't stand up."
When such crucial conversations don't occur, he said, projects suffer. According to Maxfield, 74 percent come in over budget, 82 percent miss deadlines, 79 percent fail to meet quality or functional specifications, and 67 percent result in damaged team morale.
A comprehensive report on the data will be released in September, but Maxfield said preliminary results indicate an overwhelming need for project managers to "speak truth to power" as well as for corporate leaders to make it safe for that to happen.
Leaders, he said, need to create a culture where crucial conversations are consistently held, and they must measure their progress in creating such a culture as a leading indicator of project success.
Meanwhile, individual project managers can make an immediate difference by increasing their competence at initiating and holding these crucial conversations, Maxfield said. "When you speak up, you make it safer for everyone around you to speak up; and when you don't speak up, you make it harder for everyone around you to speak up," he said.
Because these situations tend to reflect patterns of process violations, he said, project managers who can confront and resolve them "get incredible leverage for improvement."