It's Worth It!
You know things could be better: every project is a struggle. A product originally created by 5 people in 5 months now requires 40 people working feverishly for three months just to release a new feature. Not only is quality is declining, but customers are grumbling, and staff turnover is rising. A myriad of petty circumstances bogs you down frustrating your efforts to find the root causes. Your team has discussed this numerous times, proposed numerous solutions and yet the decline continues. Perhaps its’ time to bring in a consultant. But how do you know it’s worth it?
Even if we were not living in more challenging economic times, successful organizations should not throw money away. There should be a good economic justification for a course of action. How do know money spent on consulting and training is money well spent?
We will not insult your intelligence and attempt to provide you with formulas for calculating return on investment on training and consulting. If you need hard quantitative data to justify a decision to engage us, then our organization is likely not a good match for yours. However, we can offer strong qualitative indictors that it is working:
- There are fewer unpleasant surprises
- Decisions are getting made in a timely manner
- You have a sense that you are shaping change, rather than the other way around
- People are connected and not working in isolation. No one is going dark
- People feel confident they are winning
- There is a feeling that you are in control and forward progress is being made.
- Customers and stake holders believe what you are telling them
- Staff enjoy their work and are not spending so many evenings and weekends at the office
- Software teams are able to say what they do and do what they say.
- Problem indicators begin appearing earlier when you have enough time to take action to resolve them
Personal Anecdote: An ROI of -600%
If you still need a dollar and cents argument, then consider this, what is your project’s run rate? That is how much does it cost to run your project for a month? A week? Even a day? How much could you save if your project came in one month sooner? Two months sooner? Even a couple of weeks sooner? Without a controlled experiment we cannot definitely state that one course of action saved time. However, we can offer a good anecdotal experience.
One of our consultants was involve in a large project with three engineering centers in three different countries, which spoke different languages and did not fully trust one another. Communications between teams were mostly conducted through e-mail. When one team needed to come to agreement with another they usually wrote a long detailed e-mail (which of course was CC’ed to everyone).
We started to encourage regular meetings between the teams – these meetings required short haul flights, accommodation and of course meals. During these face to face discussions, potential problems, development issues were evaluated and quickly resolved. Often issues were headed off long in advance before they could manifest themselves. Rather than waiting sometimes two to three weeks for a resolution to a problem or a design issue, it was resolved in a matter of days, if not hours. In our personal opinion, it was not only the improved communications bandwidth that resulted from these face to face meetings, it was also the new level of trust that was developing between the teams that help improve our decision making velocity.
Unfortunately, management became shocked by our travel costs and demanded that we minimize travel, and use more electronic mediation. Decision making bogged down again. Given the travel expenses for this project, this decision probably saved a quarter of a million in travel costs. But it likely added at least two to four months additional time to the project because decision making velocity slowed dramatically, and previously warm relationships seem to chill. The burn rate for this project was well over three quarters of a million dollars per month. The effort to save a quarter million cost this organization at least 1.5 million and perhaps more. The problem is travel costs are visible, a clear line item on a budget just waiting to be cut. However, there is no visible line item for the continuous bleed of money on a project that runs for longer than necessary.