Not working to outcomes? Then your project is out of control

Recently I’ve been thinking a bit about teams that are delivering to outputs (doing stuff) rather than outcomes (achieving stuff) and how to help them move to be more outcome-focussed.

I’m putting out a few early thoughts here to try and crowdsource some feedback…

At this stage I’m thinking about how to influence stakeholders who may be used to teams working to outputs.

Here are a few ideas for how to get them to think differently:

• If a team isn’t working to outcomes, the project is not under control
• If a team is doing work that it can’t show might affect outcomes, the project is not under control.
• If a team is doing work that plausibly could affect outcomes but they haven’t hypothesised how much it might affect outcomes then the project is not under control.
• If a team isn’t regularly quantifying their progress towards outcomes then the project is not under control.
• If a project doesn’t have a decisive definition (a quantifiable target) of when an outcome has been met then the project is not under control.
• If a team doesn’t regularly make visible progress to outcomes then the project is almost certainly not working to outcomes and so is not under control.

Comments?

References

Quantification vs. Measurement. Bob Marshall

Impact Mapping. Gojko Adzic