Cranfield School of Management
Interview: Tony Grundy
Strategic Project Management
SM
Hello, I am Steve Macaulay from the Learning Services Team at
Cranfield School of Management. I am here today to talk to Tony
Grundy about Strategic Project Management. Tony, the first thing
to say is that you are not just a teacher of this stuff, you actually put
it into practice through consultancy.
TG
That is correct, in fact a lot of the processes have been developed
not so much in academia, but very much with working with
managers and learning from them and playing and experimenting
with them some new tools and techniques that now form the
process.
SM
Well, let’s have a look at the book – what led you to write it in the
first place?
TG
Well, there were a number of reasons. One was that project
management, I really feel is an excellent tool, provided it is not
overwhelmed with technical stuff and not everything has to be on a
complicated critical path. This is a very good philosophy and it is
also vitally important when we look at the implementation of
strategy. But in its own right it can actually be used to sort of
breakdown a strategic plan into more manageable bits and if all sort
of mini or micro strategies that then form a real basis for concrete
action. So I do feel that it is an essential part of the strategy
process and can be deployed in its own right on smaller scale issues,
without having to do it as a big piece exercise.
SM
So what makes strategic project management different from bog
standard project management?
TG
Well, conventional project management is very much about activity
analysis and timings and resources and control and planning and it
does seem to be much less to do with the earlier stages of
diagnosing why we need to have a project in the first place, looking
at the options, its scope – thinking about the sort of cunning or
clever plan to go about delivering those options which can be done
in many, many different ways. It is also about dealing with
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uncertainty, both within the immediate project and also in its
environment. So that is all very much tied up with strategy. The
other thing that I have found is that strategy tools like the option
grid, the uncertainty grid, the stakeholder analysis seem to work
really well on projects and complement the existing things like
activity analysis, Gantt charts and critical path and all that stuff. So
by combining the two you have got a more integrated process and
one which has got tools which deal with the issues. The other thing
I will say quickly is that most business projects are quite ambiguous
and changing – they don’t necessarily behave in such a way as
conventional projects like building a house, and therefore you
almost need some different tools for the job.
SM
So what do you need for a successful strategic project?
TG
Well you need a number of things, you need to diagnose why you
are trying to do it in the first place, because often you find that it is
almost a solution looking for a problem that someone comes up with
an idea and gets committed to it without thorough diagnosis. We
then need to look at what are the options for not only what to do,
when to do it and also how – it may be something that you
outsource to people outside the organisation or you could do it
quickly, much slower, you could roll it out or pilot it first. There are
all kinds of different options. So they need thorough creation and
then evaluation. And then at the planning stage that is when you
suddenly hit the kind of more traditional project management
techniques like activity analysis, work breakdown analysis – but
even those can be then identified in terms of their potential
uncertainty using the strategy tools, also the stakeholders' tools
available for that and then there is the actual implementation which,
even then the environment might change, the objectives may need
reviewing, so it is a highly iterative process. And finally looking at
the learnings, there is a stage there which is often kind of a bit thin
in normal project management – people run off to the next project
without digesting what went well in terms of process before we go
onto the next one.
SM
So, if you looked at a profile of what you would see as a good
strategic project manager, how would they differ from what I am
kind of rather pejoratively describing as a bog standard project
manager?
TG
Yes, well you asked me about strategic thinking earlier in a
separate mini interview – does the strategist have to be a
superman? And I said no. I think in many ways the strategic
project manager needs to be more of a superman because they
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need to combine the basic project management skills, they have got
to have strategic vision, they have got to be able to influence really
well and story tell and be imaginative about changes in their project
environment and got to have pretty good interpersonal skills. So
there is a lot to actually combine in one person. The ability to think
bigger picture, but at the same time paradoxically the ability to
suddenly say, right what are we actually going to deliver? Let’s
make this specific and almost to be like, I call it the strategy police
and make sure those results were actually forthcoming. So there is
a lot of tenacity and that leads us very much into some operational
skills too.
SM
So, if we get down to practicalities, you have obviously worked on
this quite a lot – can you give me any examples where you have
seen some good strategic project management in practice?
TG
Well, I think the classic was when I was doing some work with a
telecoms company, somewhere in Watford, I know we both live
near Watford, and it was about 100 million turnover and the strategy
director said I would like to a plan for the plan, so we did that and
that was the first time that I realised that you could actually – it was
very valuable to literally manage a strategic plan as a project. And
so we did a very thorough project plan of each stage and we had
the resources, the outputs, the inputs, the interdependencies, the
whole thing – the stakeholders was very thoroughly mapped out
with inputs and outputs as I said. So that went really, really well.
Now the sort of twist on this was that when we came to the crucial
stage which was the decision making by the board, I questioned at
the time we will never do this in two days, you will need three or four
and they said no we have only got two. It turned out to be five and
a half days, so beware under scoping this stage. If you think it is
going to half as long, its probably going to be twice as long, or
worse. So, it’s the political stages that need a bit of float as they
say in project management and it is interesting too that the whole
output of the project changed because the economy changed, the
market changed and they had to go through downsizing, but the
work of that project was vital in preparing for the second project
which led on, which was what I call the detergent strategy of sorting
the mess out.
SM
Now, you just quoted a success, are there any that you look at and
you can say, hey that didn’t work well at all and what were the
reasons behind that?
TG
Well, I think it was a bit of a mixture. You usually do find it a
mixture and there is a continual learning process. I am trying to
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think of ones that didn’t work out. I think probably one was, I think,
at a certain university. I think there was a group called strategy
and they wanted to look at delivering a strategy, but again I think
the problem there was it wasn’t the fact that we had a decent
process, it was simply that there might have been some agendas
that were nervous about doing this and really what actually caused
the block. In my process I bring in a classic change management
tool called force field analysis and there was clearly some hidden
constraining forces there and possibly the timing wasn’t so right.
So you have really got to examine the political environment, the
hidden stuff, before you ever embark on a strategic project.
SM
Now I am going to read a number of quotes – I mean there are
plenty in your book, very quotable quotes. One of them said if you
think its easy, its probably difficult, if you think it is difficult, its
probably very difficult, and if you think it is very difficult, its probably
mission impossible. Now what do you mean by that?
TG
Well, in the book there is a technique called a traction difficulty
analysis which was used to reduce costs at a pharmacutical company
by about £7 million. It just was spontaneously created to do the job,
anyway in that grid the axis on the bottom is difficulty – there was
easy, difficult, very difficult – what I found is that managers
underestimated by one order of magnitude sometimes, or often, the
degree of difficulty. So if they think it is very difficult it probably is
mission impossible – there seems to be almost a will to power
syndrome in projects. So you are using these kind of grids and
going down another level you can identify in a more thorough way
just how difficult it is going to be and you can’t hide from it, that is
the nice thing, you see it on paper, you can communicate it, you are
not going to do it unless you have got a more cunning plan.
SM
Now, I would like read another quote – a project team relying
primarily on activity analysis and computer software, critical path
and resource planning will get bogged down by internal politics,
often inadequate resources and inadequate project training and
project development.
TG
Well, I think that is a reflection of people spreading themselves far
too thinly. Do you know there is a favourite Blackadder film, the
Millennium Tape, where they go back in time and there is this three
foot high wall to keep the Scots out and they clearly get completely
overrun – it's very, very funny, but I think a lot of project
management is just like that, too many projects, no real
prioritisation, no saying no to anything and the result of that is the
resources quality and quantity wise are always spread too thinly.
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SM
Now the last one I am going to read says experience shows
that top management may get defensive about openly exploring
sensitive business problems – middle managers may assume it's
top management’s job to deal with change when this is impossible
and managers easily revert to blame rather than being open.
TG
Yes, I think this is even more prevalent where allegedly it is a sort of
clever environment, the more intellectual people are the more they
will deny that there is a problem and these organisational learning
difficulties seem to be endemic and no one is prepared to do
anything about them, or can do because its just emperor's clothes.
No one can say, well actually the reason why we are screwing up
this whole strategy is not because of a lack of thinking, but we just
can’t express what our views are and we can’t be open with each
other. So this is the biggest problem in many ways.
SM
Now, I would like to just reflect – we have spent quite a long time
looking if you like at your experience and the history, I would like to
project forward now and say if you were given the chance to write
another edition of your book, what future trends that are in there
would you say I would want to write a bit more about that or that is
really important – I think I need to stress that a bit more?
TG
Well, funny you should say that, you interviewed me about another
book and I did mention a few things there. Now in this case, I just
couldn’t think what I would really fundamentally want to change and
I think what has happened is that it was written a bit ahead of its
time. At the time there was nothing about the strategic
management of projects as such, and whilst there are more texts
around which sort of cover that area, there isn’t really anything that
has happened since then which I would go like, ah, that is missing.
It does seem to work as a pretty effective process.
SM
Tony Grundy, thank you very much.
TG
Thank you.
Transcript prepared by Learning Services for the Knowledge Interchange
www.cranfield.ac.uk/som
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Produced by the Learning Services Team
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© Cranfield University 2007