Strategies to Prevent Project Delays and Derailment

Implementing new technology is tough for everyone. Whether your team is small with limited resources or fully staffed, it’s disruptive, complex and time-consuming. Digital leaders must balance the needs of the project against the ongoing demands of running a business. Challenges with cross-functional alignment, organizational readiness, and changes in business priorities can throw a wrench into the most meticulous project plans, adding risk to scope, timeline, and costs.The reality is that businesses are dynamic and driven by a myriad of factors that impact priorities and funding. Over a complex project lifecycle, it’s only natural that your stakeholders will want to make pivots in strategies and tactics to accommodate new priorities. As the digital transformation partner to some of the world’s best businesses, we have developed a strategic plan to put in place before launching a major project. These steps help our clients manage business needs and launch complex projects successfully.

4 Key Steps to Future-Proofing Your Project Plans

The best way to future-proof your project plan is to ensure your technology roadmap aligns with your company’s long-term vision and strategy and to ensure you have solid stakeholder alignment. Before kicking off a complex project, determine where it fits into your broader business strategy.

Establish cross-functional alignment on the long-term vision. The purpose of these conversations, or workshops, is to articulate the blue-sky level concepts of where you want to be as a company—what you want to do, how you want to show up for your customers, and what you want to accomplish as a business.
Prioritize and align business goals. The point of this is to look at the DO NOW, DO NEXT and FUTURE state. You will need your business and technology stakeholders in the room.
Create a technology roadmap to enable your business strategy. This will help your teams understand the enablers that need to be in place to execute the strategy successfully. At this stage, priorities may need to shift. For example, if a client wants to launch a loyalty program but has disparate data across multiple systems, they would not likely get what they need from a loyalty program unless they establish a data solution first. In this case, a pivot in the technology roadmap helps the business get more out of their loyalty implementation.
Define and document key business requirements. This is crucial for ensuring your business stakeholders know what will be delivered in the execution phase. If these are clearly defined and well documented, you will avoid surprises, disappointment, and frustration later in the project. By documenting requirements, you’ll also identify gaps in your plan or decisions that need to be made, sparking important discussions and alignment upfront.

Starting your project this way creates a strong foundation by articulating a clear north star to align your business stakeholders AND a realistic path to get there.

During the implementation: Scope Management

One of the challenges companies grapple with during the execution phase is managing the project scope. Despite early alignment on the vision, priorities, and scope, stakeholders will have new requests and requirements when business or market performance changes.A few common challenges that happen throughout implementations:

Stakeholders have more perspective and begin questioning the scope and features as written.
Business challenges drive requests for added requirements or enhancements to the original scope.
Stakeholders see limitations in the existing scope and want to remedy this by adding additional requirements to encompass new ideas or business needs.

If your project manager entertains significant change requests or new requirements, the timeline and costs will skyrocket. And with delays in the timeline, this cycle could happen all over again.Your program and project managers must work closely with project leadership to evaluate these new requests and determine what should be incorporated without impacting project timelines or cost. This is where your project leadership becomes critical.So, how do you prevent your project from going off the rails?

Establish Project Governance

Steerco and governance process: We encourage clients to establish key roles, a steerco meeting cadence, and processes to ensure stakeholders are aligned on decisions, risks, and priorities throughout the project. The steerco will meet regularly and work together to mitigate issues before they spiral, identify decisions that need to be made, and troubleshoot areas that warrant further investigation.
Prepare the organization for change. We recommend including change management from the beginning of the project to ensure teams are ready for the coming change and know their role in project success. It will also identify processes that must be defined for a seamless launch and post-project success. This work helps your team to avoid surprises and frustration late in the project.

In our experience, establishing strong project governance is integral to a successful implementation. It will help keep your project on track and ensure that any roadblocks are promptly evaluated and addressed.When challenges to scope arise, strong project governance is your critical path to keeping the project on track and evaluating and mitigating risks throughout the implementation.We know digital transformation is hard. It’s not a matter of “if” there will be risks to timeline, scope or cost—it’s a matter of “when.” Aligning your teams on how the project supports your broader company strategy and vision will help future-proof your project.These are a few of the critical paths to making your implementations easier—the foundational ones that get you off to a strong start.For help with your strategic vision and technology roadmap or project implementation success, we’re here for you. The OSF Digital Strategy group has decades of hands-on digital business leadership and transformation experience to help you launch successfully.We're here to think of everything, so you don't have to.Whether you’re exploring AI adoption, multi-cloud transformation, or customer experience innovation, OSF Digital is ready to guide your next step. Get in touch with us to get started.

Author: Jessie Jackson

Jessie Jackson is a Senior Consultant, Practice Lead in OSF Digital´s Strategy group. She has 20+ years of experience as an omnichannel digital commerce business leader in the D2C industry. Jessie helps OSF clients with strategic planning, business leadership and creating exceptional customer experiences.