Project Canvas

Increase Alignment and Success in Your Projects from the book "The Project Revolution" (LID 2019) by Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez

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Projects are timeless and universal. The construction of the pyramids in Egypt, the development of modern cities, the Marshall Plan, the Apollo space programme, the creation of the European Union – all these achievements were the result of ideas being turned into reality through projects. Project-based work is the engine that generates the major accomplishments of our civilization; it has stimulated society to advance and often go beyond long-established scientific and cultural limits.

Projects change the world. Projects make impossible dreams possible.

The behavioural and social sciences endorse the idea that there are a few ways of working and collaborating that are particularly motivating and inspiring for people working on a project. These are that a project should have ambitious goals, a higher purpose and a clear deadline. You have probably noticed that what people tend to remember most clearly from their entire careers is the projects they work on – often the successful ones, but also the failed ones.

According to recent research, the number of individuals working in project-based roles will increase from 66 million (in 2017) to 88 million (forecast 2027). And the value of economic activity worldwide that is project oriented will grow from $12 trillion (in 2013) to $20 trillion (forecast 2027)¹. Those are millions of projects requiring millions of project managers per year.

After studying hundreds of successful and failed projects ranging from small individual ones (such as refurbishing a house) to the transformation of Rwanda after the 1994 genocide, I have developed a simple tool – the Project Canvas – that can be applied by any individual, team, organization or country.

The framework, which covers the basic principles and fundamentals of projects that everyone should know, is practical and easy to implement. It is a proven tool that will assist you in leading projects more successfully and in making your dreams a reality.

The Project Canvas is based on the premise that every project – regardless of the industry, the organization (profit or non-profit), the sector (public or private), or whether it is personal or professional – is composed of exactly the same elements, which determine whether the project is a success or failure. If individuals, leaders and organizations focus on these elements and apply the techniques behind them, project success will almost be guaranteed.

It is composed of 14 dimensions – the ones that research has proven to influence and determine project success. These are grouped into four major domains. Each domain, or area of expertise, has a specific weight in the success of a project, which is indicated by a percentage. The four domains are:

• Why: the rationale and the purpose and passion for launching and implementing the project successfully (~20%)
• Who: the accountability and the governance that will ensure the project is resourced and delivered (~20%)
• What, How & When: the hard aspects of projects (definition, design, plans, milestones, cost, risk, procurement) as well as the soft aspects (motivation, skills, stakeholders, change management, communication) (~50%)
• Where: the organization, the culture, the priorities and the context (internal and external) in which the project is being carried out (~10%).
  

The framework can be used by leaders and organizations at the beginning of a project to assess how well it has been defined and whether it is worth starting right away or needs further refinement. It can be applied to programmes, strategic initiatives and any other activities that can be considered projects.

Domain 1: Why

The Why dimension covers the triggers and actual meaning of a project (the rationale and business case, and the purpose and passion), which will become the drivers once the project gets underway. The drivers are to obtain buy-in and resources (from the organization), to obtain attention and time from the executives, to obtain engagement from the members of the team and to obtain support from the individuals impacted by the project.

1. Rationale and Business Case

All project management methodologies demand that projects always have a well-defined business case. Experience shows, however, that business cases have biases and subjective assumptions, especially concerning the financial benefits from the project, which often get inflated in order to make the project seem more attractive to the decision makers. Have you ever seen a project with a negative or meagre return being presented?

2. Purpose and Passion

Two of the newer elements in the Project Canvas are purpose and passion. Besides having a rationale, a project should be linked to a higher purpose. Jim Collins and Jerry Poras, authors of the business classic Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies²,  provided a useful definition of ‘purpose’, which we can adapt as follows:

A project’s purpose is its fundamental reason for being. An effective purpose reflects the importance people attach to the project’s work – it taps their idealistic motivations – and gets at the deeper reasons for a project’s existence beyond just making money.

Domain 2: Who

The Who domain relates to the executive sponsor and governance, and it addresses the elements of accountability and allocation of responsibilities. An organization or business has a chief executive in charge and accountable for its operations. The same should happen with a project, in the role of the executive sponsor, who is the ultimate accountable person. Yet, more often than not, the role is either not understood or not performed consistently with the importance it has for the success of the project. Establishing a clear governance structure at the beginning of the initiative is essential too.

3. Executive Sponsor

Many projects start without it being decided who is ultimately accountable for their successful delivery. As projects tend to go across departments, business units and countries, they are often prone to ‘shared accountability and collective sponsorship.’ As a result, many executives feel responsible, yet no one is really accountable for driving the project to completion.

4. Governance

The executive sponsor, together with the project manager, should define the project governance. The governance in a project is represented by a project chart in which the various contributing roles and decision-making bodies are defined.


One of the most important bodies in a project is the steering committee, which is chaired by the executive sponsor and run by the project manager. The members and the frequency with which they meet often determine the importance the project has for the organization.

Domain 3: What, How & When

The What, How & When domain covers the fundamental elements that constitute the project. They can be split into technical areas and people-related elements. These are the project fundamentals: hard aspects (definition, design, plans, milestones, cost, risk and procurement) and soft aspects (motivation, skills, stakeholders, change and communication). Addressing all of the elements at the right time and with enough depth will increase the chances of project success.
 

5. Scope

Understanding and agreeing what the project will consist of and deliver – the scope – is one of the raisons d’être of project management. Other terms for scope include specifications, detailed requirements, design and functionality. The scope is the most important element in making an accurate estimation of the cost, duration, plan and benefits of the project. Various tools can be used to try to determine what the outcome of the project will look like, yet this remains one of the most difficult tasks.

6. Time

“Time is money”: this famous phrase, attributed to Benjamin Franklin, is an absolute in projects. Time is one of the major characteristics of projects in that, unless there is an articulated, compelling, official and publicly announced deadline, there is a good chance that the project will be delivered later than originally planned. Delays in projects mean, besides extra costs, a loss of benefits and expected revenues, both having a tremendous negative impact in the business case of the initiative. A project without a deadline should not be considered a project – better call it an experiment, an exploration or daily business activities.

7. Cost

Budget in projects is composed mostly of the time dedicated by the project resources. These mainly include the people working on the project plus all other investments (consultants, material, software, hardware, etc.) required to develop the scope of the project. Budget is, together with time and scope, the third main constraint in traditional project management. Without budget, there is no project.

8. Quality

Ensuring that the outcome of the project meets the quality expectations is an integral part of project management, yet it is often overlooked or not a priority. Often teams focus on doing the work and leave the quality part to the end of the project when adjustments are most expensive.

9. Risk Management

Risk management is one of the most important techniques in project management and an essential duty of the project manager. Bluntly, if a project fails, it is because the risks that caused the failure were either not identified or not mitigated on time by the project team.

10. Procurement

Projects tend to have a novelty component; therefore, the need to hire external capabilities to deliver the project is much higher. As projects are temporary assignments, it is cheaper to engage external capacity during the project than to hire internal resources.

11. Human Resources

Today, project managers need to be project leaders too, especially for the more complex and cross-functional projects. These require pulling resources across the organization and changing the old status quo. In fact, we can argue that the best project managers are leaders but also entrepreneurs – they are the CEOs of their projects.

12. Stakeholders

Stakeholders are individuals and groups (entities, organizations, etc.) that are impacted by, are involved in or have an interest in the outcome of a project. The larger the project, the more stakeholders there will likely be. The more stakeholders, the more efforts required in terms of communication and change management activities.

13. Change Management

There are two types of change management in projects. One addresses the impact of change to an organization, easing the transition. The other tracks changes to a single project, creating a clear record of product tweaks or alterations to the project scope. Both of these plans aim to communicate what needs to be done clearly and accurately, ensuring that the organization and its employees are ready to embrace the changes introduced by a project. Based on the stakeholder analysis, the project manager needs to define the types of information that will be delivered, who will receive it, the format for communicating it, and the timing of its release and distribution. According to PMI’s Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, about 75-90 percent of a project manager’s time is spent formally or informally communicating during the implementation phase of a project³.

Domain 4: Where

The Where domain covers the external elements that can have a positive or negative impact on the project. These areas are often outside the control of the project leader, yet there are ways that the leader can influence the project favourably. The executive sponsor plays an important role in influencing the organization too.

14. Project-Driven Organization

Most Western companies have a hierarchical, functional structure, which is ideal for running their daily business activities. Budgets, resources, key performance indicators and decision power are ‘owned’ by the heads of business units, departments and functions.

However, the largest and most critical projects – the strategic ones – are cross-functional and cross-hierarchical by nature: they cut across the organization. This means that a strategic project, such as expanding the business into another country, requires resources and input from a number of different departments and functions.

The most successful organizations today have adjusted their structure to facilitate and support the execution of projects. They have become project driven: resources, budgets and decision-making power have partially shifted to the project activities, often driven by the implementation of a corporate project management office (PMO).

How to apply the Project Canvas in your projects and in your organization

Fundamental transformations, such as changing a company’s values and culture, always require a big investment of time, money and effort, and their benefits are very difficult to quantify. Often, the benefits are of the so-called soft – or intangible – variety, such as an improvement in motivation or the creation of an entrepreneurial mindset. The hard benefits, such as cost savings or revenue increases, are frequently not concrete. In addition, gains are generally achieved in the medium to long term, usually after three to five years of hard work.

Because CEOs and top management receive substantial pressure from shareholders and the stock markets to quickly and regularly show positive returns on their investments, they tend to be reluctant to embark on these types of initiative. Instead, they prefer to invest in acquisitions or downsizing projects, which pay off much more quickly and have a tangible impact on the bottom line.

Introducing the Project Canvas in your organization should not be as complicated as a transformation project, but it does require some radical changes in the way projects are proposed, selected, prioritized, defined, planned and executed.

A simple and agile approach I like to use to start moving towards a project-driven organization is increasing project consistency by following these seven implementation steps:

1. Develop a standard set of terms and definitions relating to projects.
2. Develop a common project guideline based on the Project Canvas.
3. Develop training for executive sponsors.
4. Develop training for project leaders.
5. Select the most qualified and enthusiastic people to be project ambassadors.
6. Assign them the most relevant and/or strategic projects.
7. Strive to become a project-driven organization.
   

In addition, apply the following golden rules at any time to assess your and/or your organization’s project capabilities:

• Push back on ideas until they are mature enough to launch a full-scale project.
• Senior executives should dedicate at least 20% of their time to supporting a project they are sponsoring.
• Projects should have an ambitious SMART goal with a clear fixed deadline.
• The best resources should be allocated to the best projects. They should be taken out of their full-time job and allowed to dedicate 100% of their time to the project.
• Quality – testing, iterations – of the end product or solution should be an obsession.

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About the Author

Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez is a leading expert in project management and strategy implementation, recognized by Thinkers50 with the prestigious award “Ideas into Practice.” He is the creator of concepts like The Project Economy and the Project Manifesto.

He is author of Lead Successful Projects (2019, Penguin) The Project Revolution (2019, LID) and The Focused Organization (2012 Gower). He has been teaching project management for more than a decade to senior executives at Duke CE, Skolkovo, Solvay Business School, and Vlerick.

Antonio has held executive PMO positions at PricewaterhouseCoopers, BNP Paribas, and GlaxoSmithKline. Former Chairman of the Project Management Institute, he is the co-founder of the Strategy Implementation Institute and the global movement Brightline.

Born in Madrid, Spain, and educated in Germany, Mexico, Italy, and the United States, Antonio is fluent in five languages. He is an Economists, has an MBA from London Business School and Insead's IDP. He is a member of Marshall Goldsmith 100 coaches.