“Facts” continue to dribble out regarding what went wrong with the Iowa Caucus. Depending on your newsfeed, you’ve seen plenty of blame tossed about. It’s fairly easy to adopt a “blame them all, and let God sort it out” perspective. My experiences lead me to a different, very specific, conclusion.
You see, I have these scars.
I’ve been through something very similar.
My own story centers around hiring a new contract IT firm to provide support for a large international company. That may not sound similar to counting and reporting caucus results, but hang with me.
That IT Project involved several factors. 1) Combine several IT Support processes 2) Re-engineer several of those processes to improve them 3) Deliver a new underlying computer system to support the new processes 4) Accomplish this with a relatively untrained workforce that had never done this before 5) Do all this in a pressure cooker environment where no disruption would ever be tolerated.
Compare that to the Iowa Caucus project. 1) Change caucus rules regarding initial and final preferences, 2) Change the way reporting will work to add real “vote” totals to traditional delegate counts 3) Deliver a new app to support the new processes 4) Accomplish this with a relatively untrained workforce that had never done this before 5) Do all this in a pressure cooker environment . . . well, you get it.
I’m suffering nasty flashbacks just thinking about it. My own experience was, politically put, difficult. The project delivered late, service levels dropped, complaints lodged at the highest levels, careers adversely affected. With Herculean effort and a lot more time, we managed to pull the nose up. Iowa, I fear, will not have enough runway remaining.
Thanks for hanging. Let’s return to the original question: who’s to blame?
While these types of project failures may seem like “team efforts,” my own experience is that the blame in these type of disastrous outcome lies squarely with . . . leadership.
It was leadership that decided the scope of the project, effectively agreeing to change too many things at once. It was leadership that failed to ask the right questions about what could go wrong and how should we adequately prepare if things go badly. It was leadership that failed to provide adequate resources to Plan B if the new app were to fail. It was leadership that allowed untrained people to download the app to use for the first time on caucus day. It was leadership that allowed precinct captains to decide on the fly which reporting process they were going to use to report results on the day of the caucus. Leadership feel asleep at the wheel.
This was an array of systemic failures that point the blame finger in a very specific direction. My challenge to you, the leader who cares a LOT about your projects, is this: Are you asking the right questions? Are you making the right risk management decisions? Are you actively taking actions to make your projects successful?
Or do you view projects as “self-driving vehicles” and you’re taking a nap? Contact us at GPS for a wake-up call.
