Donna Fitzgerald

In today’s tight economic times its hard to imagine spending money to justify spending money but below the surface there were a number of appropriate reasons for this expenditure. The first reason was that it wasn’t just the project that needed justifying it was the managers whole department and the unspoken truth was that if he couldn’t find a body of work that needed doing then he and his department were probably unnecessary. the second reason was that the company wanted to centralize IT and this manager had been picked as the poster child for why decentralized IT probably wasted money on suboptimal investments.  

 

Whether or not we want to admit some variation of this scenario plays out in organizations world wide every day, which means there are lots of poorly formed ideas walking around looking for funding.  Some we can kill in infancy through our standard project pipeline management processes but SOME need to be treated differently.  I have standard advice I give to clients on how to do this and I can guarrantee it works if done correctly BUT politics and process don’t make good bedfellows.  All the really interesting situations have varying shades of gray surrounding them and if the right people aren’t matched up to the situation then the process becomes nothing more than a bureaucracy.  

 

When I reflect on this situations one of the things that the company offered the manager was a “support resource”  with some “political” capital that could be used in service of the proposal.  An execution focused PM assigned to help build the value case in this set of circumstances would have been worse than useless.  To be honest it took me three tries to get something that made any sense to even propose.  The fact that I brought “political” capital into the situation let me convince the manager that his first two ideas weren’t salable to upper management.  The key here was that in this situation I was acting both as a professional who could develop good business cases and as a representative for upper management which allowed me to help filter out things that otherwise might have been proposed.

 

Returning once again to the politics of the situation.  After 90 days of hard work the final business case was presented to management and it was rejected as i knew it would be.  So did that mean I wrote a bad business case or that I should have done something differently to get it approved?  The answer is no.  The business case aligned, it had a value BUT the truth was that it simply didn’t make sense at the time.  An investment in the area the manger wanted to invest in was NOT the most valuable area for the company to spend money on at that particular time.  Essentially the business case was based on a “field of dreams” and what top management rightfully rejected it.

 

Lot’s more here to reflect on.  The drive of professionals to push their own agenda and not see the big picture.  The fact that we rarely admit that we don’t really have the right tools (and or practices) to solve a problem today (which we might be able to solve cheaply in the future when we do have the right technology.)  But these are all topics for another day