I hate being late. I hate it even more when my projects are late. 

I follow the mantra from the great film Glengarry Glen Ross, starring Al Pacino no less! Instead of Always Be Closing (ABC), I follow ACD. Always Be Delivering. You can’t be late when you’re early.

It seems my opinion is by far the exception. Instead, most executives roll with “Go big or go home”. They go big, they’re late, and well, eventually they go home on gardening leave.

Don’t believe me? Well, Oxford University found that 91.5% of projects are delivered late. It seems to be totally acceptable now to deliver late. What’s scary is most people don’t care, in the beginning…

Maybe this comes from a mantra that Agile personalities pushed that dates don’t matter. They had the right in the intent, although most people fail to actually understand it. It means that arbitrary dates shouldn’t be set. We should instead deliver value as quickly as possible.

This my friends is where it goes wrong. Essentially all companies I start working with are faced with this exact challenge. Not some, ALL!

Delayed delivery is a surefire way to lose executive and board confidence. Sure, there is a honeymoon period.

It lures project leaders into a false sense of security. They tell themselves “We’re busy, but our stakeholders understand”. Here’s the thing… they don’t understand. They’re frustrated. They’re raising concerns with their peers. Confidence is eroding. Here’s the kicker.

You don’t discover that confidence has been lost until it’s too late. If you’re lucky, you’re handed notice and can move onto a fresh new opportunity taking the lessons learnt with you. If you’re unlucky, you’re moved onto a new special project or non-critical operational role, left to be forgotten.

This is a major reason we get asked to help. Boards and CEOs hope a quarterly cadence with clear measurable goals will help. It’s generally the right move. However, the actual mechanism of how it helps differs from their expectation…

They think it will accelerate the project. It never does. The reality is the team is working as hard as they can. Parkinson’sLaw is partly to blame for this. 

This is where the time something takes to complete expands to the time given to complete it. Couple that with delays which invariably happens on complex projects, and you’re guaranteed deliver it late.

So what’s the remedy?

Break your projects down and make them agile. 

When I talk about breaking down, I’m not referring to breaking it into tasks. That’s basic project management. What I’m talking about here is slicing the project into small valuable chunks.

Traditional projects complete all of the work, then launch. This increases the risk that what we create actually fails to solve the problem. Back to the drawing board. You might think your project is the exception, but it’s not.

Looking at the statistics, it’ll probably fail. Furthermore, it’ll probably fail spectacularly. One of my favourite statistics is from a platform called Pendo. They found 80% of features in the typical cloud product features are rarely or never used. 

Yes. Most features are a waste of time. This isn’t just limited to tech. It applies to all projects.

There is no way to avoid this. Here is one way to minimise the risk and cost of this failure. Create valuable slices where you are testing the project throughout the life of the project. The agile bit comes in where we adapt the plan more information comes to hand. If the work we’re doing doesn’t solve the problem, then we adapt the plan. If we get feedback from the “customer” of the project which challenges our assumptions, then we change the plan.

This has one other BIG benefit that most people miss. Even my favourite finance folk! Releasing value sooner increases the Net Present Value for the business. This article isn’t a finance class, so to put it simply, this means: More monies more faster. 

This also has a compounding effect. So more monies, more faster, making more monies again. Simples.