Contented Management laughing buddha logo

Contented Management

Contented Management

Culling web projects in the age of austerity

Statue of an emaciated Buddha


Austerity is on the agenda. Across Europe, business and governments are making cuts in spending. In the UK, this means a further “clampdown” on the number of central government websites, while many private sector organisations are looking to reduce the total cost of their web presence.
Shareholders and taxpayers will applaud budgetary asceticism, but there has to be a middle way. Cut budgets from the wrong projects and you won’t achieve your online goals. Cut too far and you’ll undermine your ability to respond to new market challenges. Short-term gain will lead to long-term pain.
So what’s the best way to decide which budgets should be protected and which should be culled? I’ve found executive boards typically consider three propositions.

1. Blanket cull

The easiest way for a board to implement austerity is just to withdraw funding for all new projects. This approach may be the simplest in the short term, but it’s also the most destructive. Any board that proposes this kind of cull is tacitly admitting its own incompetence. How can you engage effectively with an online market that requires you to respond to emerging trends without investing? Be under no illusions: cutting projects doesn’t mean a loss of new revenue streams; it means conceding market share.

2. Stick to your guns

Marginally better than stopping all new projects is permitting just those that conform to your corporate strategy. This is the typical approach of an executive that is totally convinced its strategy is correct. They’ll probably have the market research to support this conviction too. But this kind of tunnel vision is fraught with risks. Who wants to place all their eggs in one basket? You’ve got to have some room to hedge your bets. It’s not just that you need to respond to market trends, it’s also that people in your organisation innovate, and by applying a rigid strategy you effectively block out those innovators. They’ll be demotivated and, if their ideas are any good, guess what: they’ll take them to your competitors and you’ll be in no position to respond.

3. Additional governance

If the board is a touch more enlightened but still clinging to its purse strings, it will introduce extra governance procedures. This is a classic ploy in most large organisations: create some new hoops to jump through and hope that this puts off anyone who hasn’t completely thought their proposition through. But this recreates the same problems: you’re satisfying your existing bean-counting processes rather than trying to discover what potential benefits might emerge as a result of a project.
When an executive introduces more stringent procedures for budget approval, it’s often because it wants to appear strong but is actually completely disengaged. It’s handing over responsibility for key decisions to a set of formulae. When the project goes wrong it will blame a poorly-constructed business case rather than the more obvious cause of project failure: lack of executive involvement.

Budgetary control is not the same as leadership

All projects rely on the executive to be actively engaged: making decisions when they’re required, providing leadership and assuring that the project continues to be aligned with organisational objectives. Fundamentally, if your executive is adopting one of the approaches outlined above, it’s only thinking about the money, not about the project. And that’s likely to mean the project’s going to fail anyway.
So if it’s a bad idea to stop new projects, stick vigorously to your existing strategy or introduce extra governance, what can you do to save money?

You’re in a hole, stop digging

Organisations are littered with zombie projects: those that have been running seemingly forever but that have never delivered benefit. These are the projects that sap the morale of the teams working on them and engender snide remarks from other teams struggling with lesser budgets yet more likely to deliver.
If your project has already been running for more than a year, has missed major milestones (or, worse still, has no major milestones), has had more than one change of project manager or systems integrator, or is just setting a strategy for other projects to follow, you can be pretty sure that it’s not going to deliver against its original brief.
Why force everyone else to tighten their belts when you’re continuing to squander money on a project that has had an opportunity to deliver but failed? It seems so obvious when you’re stood on the outside, but I think most organisations can be honest and say they’ve let some projects go on too long when they should have pursued others.
Good programme management isn’t about relentlessly pursuing the same objectives with an ever-diminishing budget. It’s about the ability to shift focus and point your organisation towards new benefits. Imposing arbitrary rules just gets in the way. So be rigorous in your budget management, but be dynamic in going after new opportunities. Be less fearful of abandoning something that hasn’t worked than missing out on something that might.


See also Alan Pelz-Sharpe’s article on UK budget cuts and public sector IT and re-assessing the value of Enterprise Licence Agreements.

Philippe Parker on | 16 September 2010 | Tweet this |

Contented Management

Does rationlalisation reduce cost?

It’s a fair assumption to make that some organisations haven’t procured their content management systems as effectively as they might have done. Poor procurement is particularly frustrating when it’s done with our money, i.e. by government. But government in the UK is steeling itself for a major cost-cutting exercise. The Transformational Government agenda is already well underway, seeking to reduce the number of government websites and streamline online services. Meanwhile the political parties have competing missions to rethink procurement, particularly of technology. You can’t argue with the idea, and as Ian Truscott points out, there are good reasons for reducing the number of websites from a user experience perspective as well as just costs. However, you can certainly question the approach.

Let’s say you try to consolidate to a single content management system. The smaller the user base for that CMS, the more likely you are to meet its requirements. As soon as you extend the CMS to multiple teams with different ways of working, different audiences and different kinds of content, you have a change management programme on your hands. The focus has shifted from where it should be, online engagement, to training existing users in new ways of working.

Over-rationalisation tends to lead to over-generalisation, and that in turn leads to a poor fit to requirements. If you generalise too much, you’ll necessarily have to introduce customisation to your system, which was precisely what you were trying to avoid in the first place.

This isn’t the only area where too much rationalisation fails to reduce costs. While preferred supplier lists brings down the cost of procurement, they’re unlikely to reduce the cost of implementation. Qualification to be a preferred supplier is strenuous, but once you’re on the list there’s very little incentive to control your prices. Preferred supplier lists can make procurement inflexible and frustrating for the business users too. New entrants to the market are seldom present, so it’s nearly impossible for government departments to be early adopters. This makes government look like it’s off-message, when in reality many civil servants are swimming against the tide to provide a good service.

What government and many other large procuring organisations end up with is a possibly cheaper but probably riskier solution: over-ambitious projects that take too long to implement and that can’t meet emerging requirements. The larger the project, the more changes to requirements will emerge and the less rational it will become. These kind of strategic rationalisations are doomed to failure. To paraphrase John Maynard Keynes, your project’s business case can stay irrational longer than your project can stay solvent.

Rationalising your web presence is a great aspiration to have, but your have to rein in your ambitions. Rationalise a feature, not the whole system, then you’re more likely to see some cost savings.

Philippe Parker on | 19 October 2009 | Tweet this |