Page 277 - The Power to Change Anything

266 INFLUENCER

know that your project is going to end in disaster, and all you
can do is sit back and watch it tumble off the track.”
Project Chicken. Another manager explained how the
team played the same pernicious game we discussed earlier. “In
every planning and follow-up meeting,” she said, “project man-
agers say they’re right on spec and schedule, while in truth
they’re quietly praying that someone else will admit that he or
she is behind schedule so that person will take the heat while
everyone else is given a reprieve. It’s a deadly game that pits
managers against one another in a way that eventually crushes
our customers.”
AWOL Sponsors. Finally, we found that the organization’s
projects suffered when project sponsors were absent without
leave. Each project was assigned a senior leader whose job it
was to sponsor the project. The sponsor was supposed to help
guide the project through the organization as they and other
leaders competed for resources. If there was a problem, it was
the sponsor’s job to seek additional resources as required,
update key personnel, and otherwise smooth the skids.
The trouble in this organization was that sometimes
sponsors wouldn’t show up for meetings, wouldn’t enforce
agreements with other departments, and would fail to align
other leaders behind the teams’ decisions. The project team
was left hanging, and the project would inevitably come to
nothing.
One project, for example, burned up thousands of person-
hours and over a million dollars in precious resources, but
ended up on the scrap heap at the end. The most painful
part of the failure, however, wasn’t just the loss of time and
money. It was that halfway into the project everyone knew
it was doomed because the sponsor was doing nothing to
enforce commitments, gain support from stakeholders, and
maintain accountability. Everyone would show up to project
meetings, but they’d just play with their BlackBerries because
they knew the meetings were irrelevant!