Hunting the Elephant in the Room - an organisation's guide to project approval 

Project approval is a little like recruiting a key person to your organisation.

The recruitment process should filter the candidates through a number of interviews to arrive at the best-fit person for the organisation, who will to arrive on site on the date he agreed, at the right level of salary, with all the things he requires to do his job (desk, computer, phone, login IDs, induction to the organisation).

The project approval process should flow along similar lines: needs are identified, requirements agreed, business cases (or their shortened equivalents) developed, and then the fledgling projects are fed through an approval process where the relevant stakeholders argue it out, with the business cases getting ever more defined and reality-based until the best project (or projects) are approved. With a solid footing the project is commissioned, timescales and outputs are defined, roles and responsibilities agreed, and in due course, on the due date, the project is complete, having cost roughly the same as the original estimate, with the organisation fully briefed and prepared to make the most of its investment.

The scenario above may seem like a utopian dream for hard-bitten project managers and executives alike, but the proliferation of Programme Management Offices (PMOs) demonstrates that organisations are taking project approval seriously, and that defined processes can be useful beyond the ITIL framework. After all, you wouldn't recruit someone on a whim for a role you hadn't really thought through, would you?

To take the recruitment analogy further, here's a (somewhat tongue in cheek) summary of problem candidates and their project equivalents.


The main similarity between these two key organisational processes is that they are all about people and the relationships between them, and therefore decisions can be much more arbitrary than organisations would like to believe.

So, how to retain the essential humanity of the processes, whilst ensuring that the organisation's best interests are served by getting to the fundamental (often unspoken) reasons for the potential project's existence - the elephant in the room?

The solution is to be brave and ask the awkward questions:


Ideally these questions should be asked by senior members of the team responsible for project oversight, either the PMO, an Audit function, or a Project Approval Board, but the fact is that these and a number of other questions have to be asked, however uncomfortable.

If a project stands up to cross-questioning, the chances are that the organisation will be satisfied that it is a worthwhile endeavour. If not, then it's either back to the drawing board to re-define the project into an implementable form, or put it on the shelf for another day.

Structured project approval is a refined form of organisational Darwinism: only the fittest should survive. If an organisation's project portfolio is pared down to the healthiest specimens, there will be far less risk of white elephants riding roughshod through the organisation's bottom line, and the result will be a leaner, fitter, more successful organisation.

Anthony Lewis is Managing Consultant at end to end consulting, a project management firm specialising in managing and advising on technology projects across the private and public sectors. Find out more at www.e2consulting.co.uk.

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