5 Are your people aligned toward success? Measuring priority and empowerment alignment EY’s experience has shown that a majority of decisions are made by the project team with only a few being made by executives; therefore, it is critical that priorities are aligned throughout the project so that the project team makes decisions that are aligned with leadership’s definition of success. When measuring alignment, we utilize the same success factors identified previously — time, cost, benefits, scope, quality and organization. From our work with challenged organizations, we have found that when decision alignment is poor: • Decisions are revisited and overturned as stakeholders with higher authority change decisions to align with their own priorities. • Decisions are delayed as the team tries to get consensus among stakeholders with competing priorities. • The team becomes frustrated and refuses to make decisions that they are responsible for, delaying risk and issue escalation (passive-aggressive), or they start making decisions not aligned with the overall project success. Poor decision priority alignment occurs more frequently on large complex projects since there are many more communication points between executives and the project team. This means that only select information is communicated, less often and more formally than on smaller projects. When this misalignment occurs, we have found that it is very common that resources will align with the priorities of their functional areas, i.e., finance resources will align with the priorities of the CFO (usually “cost” and “benefits”), IT resources will align with the priorities of the CIO (usually “time” and “cost”) and operations resources will align with the priorities of the COO (usually “scope” and “quality”). This is why, prior to the start of the project, the priorities of the six success factors must be agreed upon and communicated to the governing bodies and the project team. 12 | Unlocking the value of your program investments