I am reminded of an image from one of Lewis Carroll’s Narnia books from my childhood in which a bunch of dwarves sit in a tight inward looking circle in the middle of a beautiful meadow, imagining they are in a damp dirty stable. When others try to help them, all they do is snarl at them about trickery. “You see,” said Aslan, “They will not let us help them. They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they can not be taken out.”

The image is entertaining but I suspect the reasons why apparently valuable projects do not get the green light are complex and very human. Maybe some of the following factors are involved:

1. The Walter Mitty factor. Turning an innovation project opportunity full of opportunities for adventure and self-expression into a planned and codified set of activities and deliverables is the stuff of innovation consulting, often done at proposal stage. It kills risk, demonstrating a responsible approach. But it also kills excitement and turns an adventure into a job.
2. Blame vector alignment. He who commissions a project gets the blame if it is later deemed to fail. This is undoubtedly a big reason why ‘new broom’ CEO’s usually start with cost-cutting and codifying operations (ops excellence projects) before reluctantly facing up to the need to innovate. I’ve done so myself. Everyone knows innovation is riskier than cost-down projects.
3. Amateurs. We know that real innovation projects are challenging as well as absorbing, especially the more intangible aspects. Yet many non-professionals can’t see what all the fuss is about, especially with ubiquitous 3D CAD programs that most technical graduates can drive within a few weeks. If only product, process or service design could be made as tangible and codifiable as X man-weeks of CAD.
4. ‘Where’s the money?’ If the ultimate customer in a value chain either does not demand or positively rejects innovation, then the opportunities to exploit it earlier in the chain are limited. The construction industry is a good example. In Ireland over 30 cents in every euro earned by the construction sector comes from government and public sector projects. In almost every case these are minimum initial cost projects, with highly prescriptive specifications based on established practice. In the private sector things are little better. Residential property developers are open to bulletproof innovation only if it reduces initial cost or adds substantial sales pizzazz.
5. Yucky intangibles. There is a gulf between folk who make a living out of questioning and changing how things are done, like me, and those whose living depends on controlling business inputs, activities and outputs. Have you seen how uncomfortable some six sigma people get during discussion of the more intangible aspects of new product development, market research for example? Yet these same people happily turn on the left side of their brains when they leave work and return to their friends and families.

We have a real problem in Ireland in that we have a cohort of world-class procurement, lean, 6S and project management experts, yet little track record in (and therefore capacity for) powerful innovation.

Much in the way that CS Lewis’s dwarves were summarily knocked out of their introspective mindset by a child, I believe that only powerful positive experiences about professionally-managed innovation can change the six sigma mindset. It is tempting to run projects opaquely out of sight of the client, but although far more efficient, this transforms nobody and sometimes reduces the quality of the end result. Clients needs to be involved, challenged, pressured to deliver their bits on time, experience the rush of co-creating and share the intimacy of exposing their feelings and personalities to other team members. Experiencing that sublime combination of mental chess, plodding hard graft, forensic research, interaction with users and entrepreneurship, all of it against the clock, is what transforms complacent technocrats and ‘busy managers’ into true innovation advocates. I know – I was once as proudly blinkered myself.

So how useful is all this planning tool virtuosity in real life? My experience of working both as a consultant and ‘client-side’ has taught me this:

1. The planner needs to understand the activities he is planning. This sort of work is not just admin. It also helps to take the trouble to learn how to use MSP2007 fluently. A bad plan, full of overconstraints (which break the logical flow of activity) and over-simplifications is not convincing.

2. Paraphrasing Einstein, keep things as simple as possible but no simpler. Never try and present 200-line plans at meetings. Keep to Levels 1,2 and 3 in the task hierarchy. At that level, the rollups of work and spend are useful and convincing without inducing narcosis.

3. The greatest value of MSP plans is in the quality of estimation and the nomination of detailed tasks often forgotten.
4. In reality, MSP is next to useless for weekly project management. Far better to pull out Level 4 (‘job’ level) activities from the MSP and agree the achievement of these with the team on Monday morning or the previous Friday evening. Write down up to 5 of these goals for the week on a big piece of paper or whiteboard, so the team can see them. Then start gently probing individuals for completion about midweek or so, becoming more urgent about this as the deadline approaches.

5. Project management is often a fulltime job, yet is rarely treated as such. This is a big reason why most projects fail on deliverables and/or timescale and/or cost.

6. Bright team members sometimes are tempted to play ‘chicken’ with the plan, in delivering their ‘jobs’ for the week. If the level of challenge of their work that week is not arousing to them, they can deliberately elaborate or extend the scope, achieving a quality of deliverables which exceed requirements – but involves unprogrammed extra work and risk. A knowledgeable PM will spot people like that – and try and nip the behaviour in the bud.

7. Team knowledge and peer pressure are the most powerful tools in project management.

8. Plans for innovative work are always wrong and generally underestimate work and cost. A contingency should be retained in recognition of this. The size of the contingency should reflect the major risks on the project. I find it helpful to fill in a checklist of risks against which a project can be assessed before deciding whether to issue a quote and how to cost it (Pre-Proposal Checklist).

9. Weekly round-ups of task completion should be back-annotated into the project plan. This gives a fairly accurate picture of ‘earned value’ against programmed cash burn. This comparison is one of the best early warnings of a project that is not tracking to plan and is therefore not in proper control.