Most consultants reckon that about 70 percent of projects fail to meet their objectives.
Reasons for this are wide-ranging. Many of them are case specific and may not be repeated across time and space. Some of them happen ALL the time.
Non-implementation
The first problem is that the company just doesn’t implement the consultants’ strategy. This may be because they don’t have the administrative capacity, they can’t see the benefit of what they are doing or they have just run out of money. This is one of the reasons why consultancies are increasingly trying to do this implementation themselves.
Businesses lose faith in consultants’ strategy for one big reason. That is that change follows an S curve. It doesn’t happen all at once and it certainly isn’t steady. Instead, it takes place in big leaps of momentum. A business can’t know when these will take place and nor does the consultancy. It is therefore difficult to keep faith that another upward curve is around the corner. Rather than subjecting an entire firm to this level of uncertainty, it can be easier to pack the whole project in.
Scott Keller, Senior Partner at McKinsey likens this to the morph of a caterpillar to a butterfly. Not only is it irreversible, but it is sometimes hard to believe that change will happen at all. Across the span of the S curve of a caterpillar’s evolution into a butterfly, anyone would struggle to maintain faith.
Evolving project
A further obstacle to project success is that projects evolve and change. When consultants get their teeth into a business they often see things that they weren’t asked to fix. These are typically added as “bolt-ons” to the project’s main drift. Consultants are inclined to say yes to these extra bits because it feels amiable and a good step to building a relationship with client. These can be huge revenue drivers for consultancies but they can also be abject failures. They can require different expertise, new team members and a completely different approach. The addition may align poorly with the project’s main thrust or end up being a spontaneous, false promise.
McKinsey’s weekly podcast splits the dangers into two. First, there is the performance side which is the operational and financial results that you’re looking for. Then there’s the health side. The health side is how do to align the organisation in the right direction and execute this problem in the best way. As we have seen, problems can insert themselves at every interval.
