The Red Pill Executive. Tony Gruebl

      CHAPTER 1

      Why Project Management Fails a Whopping 70% of the Time

      “It’s a new day, people. Destiny Calls. The world expects only one thing from us. That we will win.”

      ~Master Sergeant Farell in Edge of Tomorrow²⁴

      Edge of Tomorrow²⁵

      Starring Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt Warner Bros Pictures (2014)

      When attacked by an alien force, the best military units in the world working together can’t seem to beat them. Tom Cruise plays Major William Cage, a Public Relations officer with no combat experience who finds himself on a suicide mission.

      The enemy came in the form of black shape-shifting Mimics that hide under the sand, an octopus-type thing that rolls like a tumbleweed. It had claws on each of its many legs and a gaping dragon mouth. These Mimics had two forms: the orange warrior and the powerful blue Alpha. The blue Alpha monitored battlefield events to learn the opponent’s strategy, then reset time while preserving memory. This gave the aliens an unstoppable advantage.

      Within minutes of landing on a beach battlefront resembling WWII’s Normandy invasion, Cage blows up a blue Alpha as it attacks him. Covered with Alpha blood, Cage dies. He then enters a time loop, living out the same brutal day, fighting and dying again and again.

      This time loop gives Cage the chance to improve his combat skills and his understanding of the enemy. He soon teams up with Special Forces warrior Sergeant Rita Vrtaski (Emily Blunt). Working together, they learn what it means to win at something that seems unbeatable.

      Watching patterns of human behavior, we often see the human response of “doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.”²⁶ This is so common it has become a cliché in folklore, music, books, and movies—essentially anything that embodies culture. Managing this response and creating a new outcome is at the core of almost every business book and methodology ever developed.

      Edge of Tomorrow is a marvelous example of this repetition-response situation very similar to the 70% project failure rate. Many before us have tried to win using cool tools and new plans. They’ve spent millions on developing highly specialized software and intensive training. Yet the failure rate continues to creep upward. What was a 68% fail rate in 2015, has now climbed to 70%.

      In the movie, after hundreds of attempts Cage always had the same result. He died, and the armies of Earth went down in defeat. According to McKinsey.com, “17% of IT projects go so bad that they can threaten the very existence of the company.”

      “17% of IT projects go so bad that they can threaten the very existence of the company.¹⁰¹”

      In our own quest, we refused to sit back with the blue-pill attitude of “that’s just the way things are.” Bit by bit, over time, we tried various tactics and strategies, found what worked, and pressed ahead to the next challenge eager to learn more.

      Some of our clients welcomed our new approach with open arms. They allowed us to test our mettle in the field. Others resisted. Their pushback shocked us into reality when we were inadvertently drinking our own Kool-Aid^®.

Cool Tools but Worse Results

      Over the past 20 years, project management tools have improved every year with promises of more productivity, faster, and better than ever before. We’d have a hard time keeping up with the increasing complexity without these advances. Nobody is disputing that.

      We have the Project Management Institute (PMI^®) with their PM Book of Knowledge (PMBOK). We have thousands of certified Project Management professionals.

      We have Microsoft^® SharePoint for central documentation, Microsoft^® Project, SmartSheet^® and hundreds of other online tools.

      We have Jira^®, VersionOne^®, and CA Agile Central^® for technical teams, Microsoft^® Excel with embedded Business Intelligence tools for analysis and active management.

      We have collaboration tools like WebEx^®, GoToMeeting^®, Zoom^®, and Teams^® (formerly Skype for Business^®) to keep teams in sync because now we often work virtually.

      We have agile development philosophy and frameworks, scrum, SAFe, and others.

      Every year PMI^® brilliantly updates the PM Book of Knowledge. Every year updated tools with better features appear on the market. We are gloriously awash in tools and science with so much more going for us than 10 years ago.

      All we have to do is learn the science, and we can turn the odds to our favor, right?

      Uhh, not really. Despite all these technical advantages, our success rates continue falling. What is worse, many projects that make it into the success column don’t add Business Value to the company.

      In Edge of Tomorrow, Cage had the most intricate weaponized armor imaginable. He had machine guns strapped to both arms and two rocket launchers on his back. He had state-of-the-art sensors, and a computerized voice feeding him instructions. His armor gave him superhuman strength, including the ability to jump out of an aircraft and land on his feet unharmed. He could push cars out of the way with his hands. Millions went into every high-tech suit, but he still died in the sand.

      Like Cage, we also continue to die on the beach. We might reach further inland, but we still fall to cunning Mimics hidden in the sand 70% of the time.

      Despite these horrific odds, we knew in our souls that we could win at this game of Project Management. Failure wasn’t an option. For Cage, the Alpha Mimic’s blood brought him into a special awareness and the time loop. For us, we returned to the Matrix metaphor. We summoned all of our courage to step out of the herd and open our eyes.

      We took the red pill.

Who’s in Charge Here?

      The science is good. The tools are great. So, what are the common factors across all operations, in all disciplines, using all tools and development processes? First, it’s people. For all their tremendous advances, people are, after all, still human with very specific behaviors dating back to the beginning of humanity. We became curious about psychology and behaviors that could make highly trained and capable professionals a part of the problem.

      “You control the power now.”¹⁰²

      ~Sergeant Rita Vrtaski in Edge of Tomorrow

      We looked at The CHAOS Ten²⁷, the top 10 reasons projects fail, but—to be honest—they read like a list of poor excuses, like “The dog ate my homework.”