What is Execution Failure?
Imagine how often it happens you expected your team members to complete some new project, you assigned and they fail miserably. This leads you to miss deadlines, or getting to hear from your senior or customer for not holding good on your commitments. This happens in spite of your team being very competitive in doing what they do.
Why Execution is Important?
A vision and strategy aren’t enough. The long-term key to success is execution. Each day. Every day.
Richard M Kovacevich”
This may not actually, be a problem of their competitiveness. It gives you an opportunity to reflect upon , why it may happen that in spite of you being very clear about end goal, how come your team fail to execute.
It is shocking that statistics show that 60%-90% of companies fail to execute their strategies. HBR quotes a survey where more than 400 global CEOs found that strategy execution was the top challenge facing corporate leaders. Refer the article here
What can be done to improve execution?
What we can control is our performance and our execution, and that’s what we’re going to focus on.
Bill Belichick
Checklist to ensure perfect execution
- Have you ensured that the expectations have been made clearly to all the team members?
- Has it been decided and agreed how the expectations from each stake holders will be measured ?
- Is your team fully involved to execute the plan?
- Has the right person taken the ownership of overall leading multi departmental actions to ensure end results
- Any Risk Analysis has been done to pre-empt likely scenarios which can lead to failure and how would you tackle that?
Let us understand them in details
Making Expectations Clear:
At the superficial level, its a very generic term and it is expected that everyone understands the expectation easily. This is where most error happens. Though it may be easily explainable in terms of words. It is important to note here, what is the expected contribution from different team members when defining the expectations, in terms of their respective work area.
This is even more relevant when their are multiple stakeholders and event of not clearly specifying the expectations lead to either one stakeholder pulling other too much or not involving the other stakeholder at all or even certain points falling in gap.
Tools like Quality Function Deployment can be used to set the expectations
Measurement of the progress and completion milestones
After the Expectations have been set clearly and communicated to stakeholders, next important activity is to monitor the progress regularly , to monitor the deviation as well as to correct the deviation whenever required.
This should be the target KPI measurement value, at different points of time during the duration
Gantt Chart is a frequently used tool for this purpose.
Before we get ahead, identifying the expectations from every stakeholder and setting the timelines and milestones , are easier said than done. They require most of thinking, visualizing, finding the ways out when things don’t seem to be moving.
You have got to get into details and that is where the Devil Lies
Team Involvement
Once you are done with earlier two points, next important check point is to ensure all the team members to align and get involved in the project, while taking full accountability of the actions required.
Accountability is important to ensure that everyone involved is held responsible for their actions and commitments. This helps ascertaining that everyone is working together towards the common goal and can help prevent misunderstandings or miscommunications.
Celebrating milestones and successes along the way can help keep the team motivated and energized. This can be as simple as acknowledging a job well done, or more formal celebrations such as team outings or rewards.
RACI is an important tool that could be used to ensure stakeholders involvement.
Multi Departmental Leader
If the project has got a full fledged project manager, this should be the project manager himself. The purpose of having this leader is to make a consensus & set the right direction, about the need of the the project on regular basis, wherever there may be altercation within the departments. He is supposed to be involved in ensuring the timely settlements and directional alignments.
This can help ensure that everyone is working towards the same goals and can help identify any potential roadblocks or delays.
He should anticipate and Manage Risks. Identify potential risks and challenges early on and develop a plan to manage them. This can include developing contingency plans or allocating additional resources to address potential issues.
Risk Analysis
The risks can be of key resource , which are otherwise vital for the success for the project, not being available or absent during required duration. Or, risk can be, for capex projects, costs overrun and it should be measured and anticipated well within time.
Risks can be related to scope creep where it is identified that current completion plan is set insufficient to make the project objective meet.
Tools like FMEA(Failure Mode & Effect Analysis), SWOT analysis may be used for risk assessments.
While this list may not be exhaustive, it covers key aspects of managing large project and thus ensuring successful execution.
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