Think about the last big project you delivered on time and on budget. It’s probably hard to remember. A recent Quickbase survey of more than 1,000 decision makers across industries found that most projects suffer cost and time overruns … In fact, 64% of projects are affected by project delays at least 20% of the time.
These delays are widespread, resulting in lost productivity, employee frustration, and ultimately, projects that run behind schedule and over budget. YOur organization and your employees are likely to spend more time doing repetitive, disconnected and unproductive gray work switching between multiple tools, preventing them from doing the critical work that drives revenue.
In so many places, work moves so quickly that no one has time to plan for next year, let alone the next five. The result is a Band-Aid approach: fiefdoms of small teams that use their own processes and tools just to keep projects moving. This approach may work for a while, but sooner rather than later, challenges arise that are complex and teams need to be able to work together in a more coordinated way.
However, they cannot, and so the library of bespoke processes and tools continues to grow and teams continue to operate in silos, relying on increasingly disparate systems that inhibit collaboration. For example, when we asked respondents how many different software solutions they use, the average response was 10. Additionally, a majority (65%) of respondents said that multiple software solutions prevent them from easily sharing information related to project with others.
It is crucial that organizations understand the real costs and consequences of all these cares. There are many, including multiple software solutions that create chaos and overwhelm employees; wasted time surfing a network of DIY solutions and looking for information; manual solutions that exacerbate employees’ struggle to get work done; and a general sense of frustration over miscommunication, disconnection, and wasted time.
Our survey shows how much time, energy and effort is being wasted. Survey respondents reported spending an average of more than ten hours per week on non-value-added activities such as data entry/transfer and synchronization between different systems and tools. Again, it’s not surprising that this Many projects are not being delivered on budget or on time.
Try it in your own organization. Conduct your own survey and/or hold roundtables between different teams, asking them about their experience getting work done and why their projects may be behind schedule. This will give you a realistic idea of where your organization spends its time.
Chances are you’ll find something similar in our survey, like how 58% of respondents spend less than 20 hours per week on meaningful, result-generating work on key projects. The connection between wasted time and late and over-budget projects should quickly become apparent.
Once you’ve identified where the sticking points are and understand the cost of your projects, teams, and employees, it’s time to take action. But watch out for the usual reaction of “Tech can fix this!” Organizations that run out and get a bunch of new software run the risk of exacerbating the problem.
Instead, take a step back. Keep in mind that the way we work now is very different than it was 10 years ago, as it is to want to work. That’s why at Quickbase we spend so much time thinking about the changing nature of dynamic work.
Consider people at the core of your processes, perhaps the most important and messiest part of it all. In an ideal state, you would bring people together and ask yourself: How do you all work together? When leading a complex project, do you have phases? An order of operations? A project plan? And what challenges do you see when you look at how all these teams, processes and plans are connected?
It’s rare to see organizations bring people together and chart all of this. Instead, it is more common to see a fragmented set of overlapping processes, and instead of diagnosing the drivers and mapping them, organizations opt for the latest splash tool to paper over these gaps and holes. But if you’re putting technology on a shaky foundation, it’s like building a house on mud.
Here’s a different approach: To help others better understand a work process, develop and share a workflow diagram. Mine looks like a bunch of swim lanes, showing how a request from Team A is passed to Team B and then into System C, creating a visual understanding of how work flows between teams and projects , something many organizations struggle to visualize. Implementing a technology without this perspective forces processes into the tool. A people-first, process-first approach can ensure the right choice of the core platforms, tools and technologies you need.
This is where you should start, regardless of whether you’re trying to get a small department to deliver something on budget and on time or managing the kind of massive mega-projects that often run into delays and over-budgets. Gaining this understanding of where your organization spends its time will enable you to match your people with your processes and tackle the increasingly complex problems of our modern day.
