November 18, 2020

Poor Project Execution – The Hidden Costs.

By Lee Bourke

IT projects are notorious for having a high rate of partial or total failure.  These failures are often born of poor project execution and can lead to any or all of the following outcomes;

  • Additional resources needed to deliver the project on time.

  • Additional time to deliver the project with the same resources.

  • Reduced or modified functionality of the project deliverable.

As well as these troubled outcomes there is also the fatal outcome where nothing gets delivered.  This blog seeks to educate on the hidden costs of the poor project execution that lead to these outcomes.

Before exploring the hidden costs let’s take a look at the real or understood costs.  In project terms there is a golden rule relating to remediation (rework) costs.  Essentially the cost of remediating a troubled project magnifies exponentially the further into the project you get before identifying the issue.  For example:

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Figure 1: Relative Costs to Fix Software Defects (Source: IBM Systems Sciences Institute)

This table tells us is that if we fail to discover an issue until the project has gone live then we are faced with a cost to remediate that is one hundred times greater than if the issue had been found during design. So lets assume the issue in design cost four project hours to remediate.  Using sixty dollars an hour as our cost base then failure to find an issue until a solution is live could cost us $24 000 to correct.

Now those hard costs are a real problem for an organisation, yet these can often seem insignificant next to the hidden costs of poor project execution.  Lets explore some of the major hidden costs of these poor project deliveries;

Opportunity cost of the project team resources

In most organisations there is a resource bottleneck in relation to high value IT resources.  These resources are rarely idle and generally go from one project to the next as an organisation continues to transform itself or its clients based on the demands of their respective markets.  When a project suffers from poor execution it either delays the current project resources moving to a new project or it draws in resources off another project to help with the remediation.  In either case there is another of the organisations projects that gets delayed or restrained.  It is rare for organisations to factor in the cost of these ‘other project’ delays when assessing the cost of a poor project deliverable.

Opportunity cost of your executives

When a project starts spinning into a troubled state it inevitably drags the organisations executives into it’s wake.  These executives are the ones that need to re-organise and reallocate resources.  They are also responsible for the additional communications and expectation management around the knock-on impacts of the struggling project.  This all takes time and distracts the executives from other tasks.  These other tasks could be revenue in nature or could simply be tasks to ensure the efficient operation of the organisation.  Either way these knock-on effects can become quite costly and are never assessed as costs associated with the rectification of the troubled project.

Opportunity costs associated with sales misdirection [service provider]

If your company is a third party delivering the project for your client then there are a whole extra level of opportunity costs you need to consider over and above the ones detailed already.  The largest of these is the opportunity cost of having your sales arm continue to be involved in a damaged project.  If your sales team are engaged in these post sales activities they reduce the amount of pre-sales activities they can perform and as such there is a direct reduction in revenue.

Future revenue cost of reputational damage.

Often a troubled project leads to failed customer promises.  These failed promises lead to reputational damage that can impact the organisation to sell its customers products in the future.

Future revenue cost of late delivery

Often an organisation is undertaking a project to enhance a listed product or create a new tailored product for its customers.  Delays to these enhancements or delays to the introduction have a direct revenue implications.  Notably like the previous hidden costs, these are never taken into account when tallying the costs of poor project execution.

As you can see from the above list there are some very compelling reasons why we should all place a high premium on getting projects executed correctly the fist time around.  Feel free to review the following blogs that deal with the methods for avoiding these poor project outcomes;

Avoid Implementation Issues – The Big Four.

Delivering a Great Requirements Document

At FileBound we would love to hear any thoughts you have around this subject matter.  Have we missed anything? Have you noticed similar outcomes?

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