WHITE PAPER

Reinvention:
Taking Personal
Advantage of
the Project
Failure Problem

Make your reinvention Reinvention initiatives are critically

initiatives major personal important in todays rapidly changing
and organizational business climate. Customer relationship management,
successes with three sales force automation, revenue management, supply chain
systematic changes. optimization, business intelligence, enterprise risk management
these large projects, usually with significant IT components, offer
the opportunity for companies to improve business processes and
achieve sustainable competitive advantage. But to be successful,
they need to manage projects differently, which requires other
factors to be taken into consideration. If you introduce new
technology, theres the promise of greater efficiency, and thats
quite obvious. But whats more important than efficiency is
doing things better, says Michael Krigsman, creator of ZDNets IT
Project Failures blog and CEO of Asuret, Inc. Reinvention not only
involves the introduction of technology, but also the improvement
of business processes.
 The success of important reinvention initiatives is crucial. Failed
reinvention projects jeopardize the performance of companies
and destroy otherwise successful careers. Unfortunately,
failure is common. Often, with reinvention efforts, companies
become tied up in a variety of people complications;
stakeholders lose their enthusiasm; and, at times, projects are
abandoned before theyre completed. Lets look closely at why
these projects more often than not experience failure and how
to approach project management to improve outcomes.
I saw this reinvention-based
project management approach
in action during our SAP
implementation at Coca-Cola
Enterprisesthen I understood
what we had been doing wrong.
There is a better way.
Shaun B. Higgins
board member of ARYZTA and former CFO and
European president at Coca-Cola Enterprises
The Current State of Project Management
Good project management is critical to the success of
any project. However, even organizations that have good
project management practices experience high failure
rates. Organizations need to manage reinvention initiatives
differentlycombining traditional project management
skills with a systematic approach for managing business-
IT alignment.
Consider these statistics:
u Seven in 10 technology projects are considered failures1
u Nearly one in five projects will be cancelled entirely2
u 88% of projects exceed deadlines, budget or both3
To succeed, organizations must effectively manage the
source of risk. Where does that risk come from? It comes
from the project management model itself.
1 Your Enterprise, and former CIO of The Coca-Cola Company.
OASIG study of 14,000 user organizations
2
Ibid., Standish Group
3
Standish Group, cited in www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConWebDoc.8418
2 WHITE PAPER | Reinvention: Taking Personal Advantage of the Project Failure Problem
The model that organizations apply to their reinvention
initiatives is flawed. As a result, even good project
management consistently produces bad results. Before we
look at how the model needs to change, lets look at the
core issues within the conventional project management
approach and why that approach often leads to failure with
todays reinvention initiatives.
Whats Wrong With Traditional
Project Management
A common concern with reinvention initiatives is that the
traditional project management approach can be perfectly
executed yet still fail to deliver successful results. Why
does this happen? With large organizational initiatives, the
conventional approach continually under-delivers, because
it wasnt designed to factor in human dynamics. It is based
on Frederick Taylors Principles of Scientific Management,
published in 1911, and was designed for the Industrial Age.
It works well for repeatable deliverables, such as those
produced in an assembly line.
Projects with large organizational components are not as
simple as assembly lines. Successful reinvention projects
must adapt to todays ever-changing Knowledge Age,
whereas the traditional project management approach can
be relatively static. When you apply conventional, scientific
management project management techniques to modern
organizational environments, planning is not dynamic enough,
the implementation process is too inflexible, and the amount
of effort it takes to get work done is often untenable. It is no
wonder that reinvention initiatives suffer high failure rates.
The fundamental problems that arise in major initiatives are
lack of collaboration and cooperation across groups, business
units, departments, and across the company, Krigsman says.
When looking at them from a reinvention perspective, there
is a clear need to systematically create more effective lines of
communication across different functional groups.
Unfortunately, the traditional project management method
does not address how to successfully get and keep various
stakeholders on the same page. This is necessary for a
project to succeed. Organizations need a different yet
systematic approach to successfully manage the ongoing
tradeoff decisions, says Jack Bergstrand, founder and CEO
of reinvention consultancy Brand Velocity, author of Reinvent
To make matters worse, when symptoms such as schedule
delays emerge with the conventional project management
 approach, companies often try to clamp down on the controls
even further. The resulting over-engineering often amplifies
the problem, because it becomes even more difficult to
manage the human dynamics that are typically at the heart
of the problem.

Managing communication and collaboration is hard. Its a

people thing, not a press-the-button thing, so that means
that it requires vision, time, and commitment at a high level in
the organization, Krigsman says. It is easy and tempting to
want to use a sledgehammer approach. Press a button and
everyone collaborates and communicates better.

The bad news: There really is no button you can push to

manage human dynamics. But there is a project management
approach for successfully managing them.

I saw this reinvention-based project management approach

in action during our SAP implementation when I was CFO and
European president at Coca-Cola Enterprises, says Shaun
B. Higgins, a board member of ARYZTA. Then I understood
what we had been doing wrong. There is a better way.
How to Turn Reinvention Initiatives
into Personal and Organizational
Success Stories
To succeed, three areas need to be managed:
1. Single strategic vision in business language
across stakeholders
2. Integrated and dynamic planning linked to personal
preferences
3. Shared business-wide project management lifecycle
independently facilitated
Lets look at each component in further detail:
1. Single Strategic Vision in Business Language
The most common pitfall related to managing large
reinvention initiatives, says Bergstrand, is failing to establish
and maintain a single living vision across stakeholders.
Most people are trained to be specialists, he explains, and
have their own unique, invisible mental models. As such,
they typically own various individual pieces of projects in
relative isolation. Problems enter the picture when, as an
organization, the key stakeholders lack a common frame of
reference and therefore lack a way to get and stay on the
same page and head in the same direction.
The conventional project management approach tends to
spend too much time establishing a vision and not enough
time keeping it relevant. As a result, business-IT alignment is
a perennial issue and often gets worse as projects proceed
over time. Organizations can better manage this situation
by systematically and individually listening to stakeholders
through open-ended interviews to create a single version
of the truth in business language. As it turns out, groups
of people are typically very ineffective at creating visions
together but are usually very good at responding to a vision
once it has been developed. Establishing reinvention visions
this way is significantly faster and more effective. Its also
easier to later use the relationships developed during the
individual interviews to manage disconnects when they
inevitably occur with time.
2. Integrated and Dynamic Planning Linked to
Personal Preferences
The second reinvention project pitfall is the lack of integrated
and dynamic planning. Project planning usually takes too
long, is too detailed, and often does not adequately integrate
the knowledge of key stakeholders. In conjunction with these
important considerations, tools such as the Myers-Briggs
Type Indicator often dont connect the dots between personal
preferences and successful project management practices.
Organizations can improve project outcomes significantly by
formally integrating the abilities and preferences of project
team members. It is important to learn from Myers-Briggs,
but also improve upon it. Knowing peoples preferences and
abilities at both the personal and organizational levels
is like turning on a light switch, Bergstrand says.

3 WHITE PAPER | Reinvention: Taking Personal Advantage of the Project Failure Problem
 Given the differences among the personalities that important
reinvention initiatives need to manage, the planning of
reinvention initiatives is better when it is a dynamic exercise.
The best thinking needs to be integrated in real time, while
also getting key stakeholders on the same page and moving
in a single direction.
3. A Shared project management lifecycle
Another pitfall and opportunity that organizations encounter
when managing reinvention initiatives is the lack of a shared
business-wide project management lifecycle to proactively
manage business/IT alignment issues. IT and non-IT
stakeholders too often dont share the same process or
language. This hurts project results.
Managing communication and
collaboration is hard. Its a
people thing, not a press-the-
button thing, so that means
that it requires vision, time, and
commitment at a high level in
the organization.
Michael Krigsman
CEO, Asuret, Inc.
4 WHITE PAPER | Reinvention: Taking Personal Advantage of the Project Failure Problem
The entire company not just IT and project teams
must share the same project management approach. A
shared process is needed, with an integrated view for
where the initiative intends to go and why; what needs to
be done and when; how best to do those things; and who is
responsible for which tasks. It sounds simple, but it is rarely
done. As part of this, there are constantly important problems
that surface with reinvention initiatives, and they must be
solved within and across key stakeholder groups. Reinvention
projects unlike non-organizational initiatives can
benefit significantly from the ongoing use of independent and
experienced facilitation to continually ensure a single version
of the truth and a single project direction. This independent
facilitation role is usually missing when reinvention projects
struggle.
Taking advantage of a shared project management lifecycle
and independent facilitation will significantly accelerate
results and reduce waste, and ensure that multi-function
and multi-vendor projects achieve better business results.
How to Get Started
On the one hand, with important reinvention initiatives, one
size fits one. Every company and project is different because
stakeholder personalities and priorities are different. On
the other hand, with reinvention projects, by systematically
changing your approach, what is normally a disadvantage
can be turned into an advantage. This makes organizational
reinvention a major personal and organizational opportunity
in the process.
By using the principles outlined above, your reinvention
projects can be more successful. To learn more
about how you can benefit from this approach, visit
www.brandvelocity.com. n