How to identify recurring issues in your projects

by Nicki Carruth | Apr 4, 2022 | Portfolio Assurance

Problems with a project aren’t always easy to spot if you’re not looking. While mistakes in delivery or problems with a platform technically can be identified in the moment, many of the bigger issues that truly threaten project success are made up of longer term, systemic issues. Small but constant issues can mount up and prevent progress. It’s typical for businesses to only recognise this well after the problems started, which means these issues are recurring and wear down the efficacy of the project.

In this article, we’ll talk about this challenge, and how teams and businesses can better identify recurring problems in a project, hopefully to catch them sooner and address them.

Ensure that every project’s reporting and governance is best practice

It wouldn’t make sense to talk about any other element to issue identification in projects besides the reporting function. Reporting isn’t simply an arbitrary tick box exercise to placate the senior leadership team. It’s a mechanism through which all stakeholders of the project can make decisions about any part of the project that may not be working so well. Reporting best practice for projects pulls in the quantitative data of budget, hours and progress % complete, but it also incorporates commentary around all streams of work in the project that gives readers a clear view of the roadblocks and insights gathered in the time period. Governance exists to set out the rules of the game as it were – who is responsible for what part of the project, risks, reporting, and the way the project will be delivered. By capturing the responsibilities and communicating this effectively, solutions to problems (even minor ones) can be allocated to the best person to own. The ownership element of governance helps put a stop to recurring problems, provided comms and reporting are in place as well. In projects where ownership isn’t clearly defined, the risk of these problems recurring and growing is much higher. It can’t be on one or only a few people to resolve or navigate through every issue the project experiences. While a project manager might be able to resolve issues around the delivery team’s time management and efficiency, they’re unlikely to have the influence to remove a major roadblock with a senior stakeholder. It’s important that governance provides the project with enough ownership at the right levels to resolve recurring issues swiftly.

Conduct retrospectives for each project – and capture the notes

Recurring issues in projects are so commonly related to one simple mistake – not looking back at the project. Project learnings are so invaluable, yet businesses often gloss over the details and miss important insights. Retrospectives are more about helping the business going forward than they are about being negative or pointing the finger. When the retro is facilitated properly and comprehensive notes are taken, the business becomes equipped with a number of insights that can be fed back up to leadership teams, programme managers and other stakeholders that hold influence on the success of future projects.

Every project needs a retrospective. If it’s a large/multi year project, these retrospectives may need to occur after each big milestone, in order for those learnings to be fed back into future stages of the project.

Collate the reports and retrospectives from the past few years

Even with one good retrospective, organisations can sometimes miss big issues that are plaguing their projects and BAU activity. With each project likely to have different personnel, it’s valuable to have a number of retros from the past couple of years and allocate resources to analyse these findings. Doing so can help to pull out common issues that the business is enabling through their existing practices.

For example, 5 different projects across comms, technology, property, people and finance may have all suffered from:

Poor scope
Inadequate resources
Inability to get timely stakeholder signoff
Difficulty coordinating the team with remote and onsite mix

No matter how different the subject matter or focus of a project, there are many problems that can occur with people, delivery and sign off. When retrospectives are reviewed, there can be some incredibly beneficial insights that the leadership team can work into a plan to improve future projects or programmes.

Pulling out themes that appear often

What areas seem to come up the most? Does your business seem to suffer from a particular thread of issues in every project that runs? Spend time analysing data from reports and retrospectives to better understand where the issues are.

Reporting issues

Is information missing in the reports from projects? There should be a clear, chronological timeline of the project’s progress from all important aspects. If it’s not clear what happened in a project for any stage or milestone, there’s an issue with reporting.

Common issues and areas to address with reporting may include:

Gaps in financial information such as budget expended at a certain date
Lack of context or commentary as to what’s been happening in the project
No clarity on the actual amount of progress against deadlines
A lack of consideration for the audience reading it (e.g. too long and irrelevant detail for a senior leader).
Reporting platforms not being utilised.
No separation between detail-oriented reporting and more high level reports
Unclear expectations from the sponsor or leadership team as to what information the organisation needs.

Solving reporting issues is something that can be done through overhauling governance. If every future project team has complete understanding on what’s expected through reporting, these recurring issues will reduce dramatically.

Budget issues

Budget issues are tricky, because they’re so common there’s almost an acceptance that big projects will encounter some degree of budget overrun or reshuffle. What organisations need to work out however, is whether every project they initiate is being subjected to budget problems that are avoidable. There’s a few different problems that can arise from project budgets, including:

Not enough budget allocated to the entire project.
Not enough budget allocated to individual stages of the project.
Too much budget for one thing and not enough for others.
The scope of projects aren’t detailed enough to give the business direction on the budget required.
The business is constantly unlocking extra budget for the same things (i.e. make these things standard to every project).
Budget is being expended too quickly against the project timeline.
Resources are draining the budget through inefficiencies or lack of direction.

Fixing systemic budget issues is one area that ought to get quick buy in from the leadership team in the organisation. Better planning and use of budget unlocks more opportunities for the business to invest in other areas.

Stakeholder issues

Are your stakeholders preventing the success of your project through how they interact with the delivery team? Or are stakeholders simply not given enough context to do their role effectively? There’s no need for stakeholders to come with negative connotations for project teams, but they often do. This can be due to:

Poor communication between stakeholder and project team.
Not enough briefing in of the stakeholder of their role and responsibility by the leadership team or project sponsor with regards to the project (many will be involved in the BAU work of a different business unit as well).
Relying on the wrong channels to get buy in or sign off (e.g. email vs a meeting for something high stakes).
Disagreement of the best course of action between that stakeholder and the project’s scope.
Additional requirements introduced by stakeholders that are not put through formal change request processes.
Any of these on their own recurring every project can be a major disruption. If you’ve got a number of these going on, there’s a huge opportunity to make projects run better by addressing them.

Vendor or 3rd party issues

Many projects rely on external providers for completion. Examples include an office relocation company for a property project or a software provider for a digital transformation. The relationship between the business and their suppliers is crucial to get right, because every minute and piece of work delivered is being charged. Common issues that can be recurring here include:

The vendor hasn’t been adequately briefed on the outcomes required.
There is not a strong relationship built at all levels with the supplier (high level relationship or day to day delivery teams).
That supplier was not the best option (tender/procurement process issues).
There are delays in getting the product delivered.
The budget and time allocated is being continually overrun.
There’s not enough contingency built into budgets.
The needs of the business are not being listened to.
Strained communication between your organisation and its supplier(s).

As the paying customer, you’re well within your rights to keep a tight control on and expect high quality outcomes from your suppliers. From choosing the right partner to managing the relationship, it’s imperative that your organisation has clear guidelines on the vendor engagement to prevent big costs and stress in future.

Technology issues

Your business likely demands a certain level of technology to run. When teams are not supplied with adequate technology whether that’s software, hardware or anything else, the whole project can stall. Often these issues will be identified by the delivery teams themselves, so it’s important that reporting and leadership practices capture what the team is feeding back. Going forward, a business should view technology as one of the key building blocks of success and incorporate its requirements into the scope and project plan’s dependencies. There should also be a clear line of escalation should technology fail or become inadequate to delivering the project’s outcomes. A day without the required tools for the team to progress is money you’ll not get back.

Interviewing your project managers or programme owners

Talking to project managers across all of your active and recently completed projects helps to fill in a lot of gaps that reporting may leave out. Here you’ll gain more personal insights into the issues that are recurring in the business – things that they may not have felt comfortable including in a report, but may be just as essential to know. It’s through these discussions that some vital but uncomfortable truths may be shared. Is there a particular stakeholder or business unit that is preventing projects from performing at their best? Does the business have a culture of not supporting project teams enough? Knowing this may save the organisation millions of dollars in the future.

Prioritising 4-5 main areas to be focused on for the next year of projects

Once you’ve got a clear idea of all the recurring issues, it’s up to a senior leadership team and their advisors to decide its priority items. These can be applied to existing and future projects.

Creating an action plan to address each

Each issue will need its own unique action plan. This will require involvement from a number of parties, from the leadership team to programme directors to stakeholders. You may also want input from an external partner with experience in improving project delivery. The action plan may not get it perfect right away, but some fundamental changes can be a good start.

Monitoring and comparing results

The key to influencing long term change in the way your business delivers projects is to measure each of these improvements and compare the outcomes between each project in your portfolio. For example, a new process around better supporting project team members may be measured through their staff satisfaction or attrition rate. The measure of whether a new initiative to fast track tech support for projects could be assessing how much downtime is timesheeted and consequently how much project budget is expended by this compared to pre-change.

Want help finding the reasons your project portfolio is not as efficient as it could be?

Creating a comprehensive, fully objective picture of where the recurring issues lie in your organisational projects is not an easy task. Even the most experienced leader can struggle to pick out all issues as they’re more likely to have a certain context or viewpoint that may subconsciously negate or favour certain issues over others. This is why many organisations engage the help of IQANZ. We provide a specific portfolio assurance offering which delivers detailed assessment of how the organisation manages projects, and will help to determine where the real issues lie for the business. We have a number of methodologies to extract this information, and help to build plans to address each issue going forward.

Chat to our team to learn more about IQANZ’ portfolio assurance offering.