Try out this adage: “A project worth doing is worth doing faster.” Not sure what it takes to make something an “adage” but given the wisdom of years, I fully buy in to those words.
I have yet to be part of a project where anyone said “let’s slow this down.” IT projects are always wanted “yesterday.” New product development projects lose sales every day they’re delayed. Process improvement projects need that improvement asap to help meet or beat budget. Even “negative NPV” projects brought on by compliance demands should be done quicker in order to quash that lingering risk and shift project resources to more shareholder-appealing endeavors. Try it out again.
“A project worth doing is worth doing faster.”
For many projects, even a single day is worth. . . something. For proof, let’s consider an easy example, a new product. Once the new product is designed, developed, tested and manufactured, we’ll be ready for market. Let’s say our target for launch is October 1.
If we delay by a month, we’ll lose sales planned for October. What will that cost us? The initial month of sales shifts to November. Some will say we lost the first month’s sales. In fact, the loss from delay is NOT the first month, but one of the middle peak month’s of sales. Growth and decline are what they are. What’s lost is one of the months in the middle. Further, we also delay the start and value of the next project. Together those are big impacts which can be quantifiable by the day.
Conversely, if we gain a month, we gain an additional month of peak sales. We also gain by being able to divert project resources on to the next project quicker. Every single day gained delivers a premium. Every day lost costs real money. I had a project that needed to “go-live” at a financial quarter-stop. If we missed that quarter, we had to wait three months for the next go-live window. The delay cost of a single day was in the millions!
Many executives/managers would be happy enough if a project would “come in on time,” meeting the expectations of initial timeline commitments. Over the years I’ve found this to be a “defensive” philosophy which does little to help the project team execute. Better is an executive/manager that wants to win by valuing every day. Best is a project team that knows what every day is worth.
Knowing a project is worth $5K a day, for example, gives project leaders a distinct tactical advantage when evaluating mitigations for gaining (or to avoid losing) time. Shall we add a contract resource at $12K? Applied on critical tasks, this will shorten our timeline by five days. That’s a savings of $25K from a $12K investment, netting 13K – let’s go for it!
Managers should emphasize that every project day matters. To walk that talk, an approved project should have a “daily value” calculated, based on value the project brings or penalty it avoids (such as for compliance projects). This practice will go far in creating a project excellence culture, and one that believes:
