Addressing the Problem of Fuzzy Front End

What is the Fuzzy Front End?

The Chinese have an old proverb, “a thousand-kilometer journey starts with the first step.”  But what is the first step?  How do you know it’s in the right direction?  What are the prerequisites that must be dealt with?  What if the destination itself is rather fuzzy?

Projects, especially complex projects with high uncertainty as in the case of innovation, often have many if not infinite approaches of addressing the projects.  One of the first and perhaps most challenging project management activity is to find the optimal approach addressing this challenge. Seasoned project managers must analyze the situation, which includes the sponsoring organization(s), stakeholders, capability and maturity of the processes, the project deliverables themselves, and a myriad of other environmental, organizational, and team factors to determine the optimal approach.

 

Anatomy of the Fuzzy Front End

The fuzzy front end is defined as the period between the project initiation as an idea and when it is ready for development. In this critical phase, all customer problems, issues, process gaps, untold opportunities, future upgrade plans and friendly chitchats happen. They may be not formally documented or identified as future sales opportunities. However, they are said and should be taken advantage of. The real strong customer relationship starts here. In addition, the potential of project success also starts here. At this very beginning, customers are usually in a messy state of mind. They have no defined requirements and there are no clear timelines for him to have hopes for. All this needs to be determined. To benefit the project the most, and avoid derailment, organizations should retain project experts to develop a well-organized approach to the project execution.

Above are just some examples of common challenges at the initiation of projects. There are potentially endless lists of factors contributing to and aggravating the “fuzziness” of the projects at the initiation and planning stages.  Below are three main categories of factors:

 

1. Project Factors

• Project deliverable itself is poorly defined or understood (e.g. technically difficult to specify the details or lacking internal expertise to fully define the deliverables) or pin down (e.g. as there are multiple conflicting factors)
• Innovative projects, especially those at the bleeding edge, are by definition implementing new and often unproven technology. This creates additional uncertainties such as stability, quality, functionality, and potential integration issues with the rest of the systems and processes.
• Project deliverable can be changing, whether the reason for the change is environmental such as competitive moves or changing regulation, and/or internal such as stakeholders switching their preferences or disagreements
• Project constraints can also contribute to this challenge. As constraints tighten, the implementation challenge becomes immense, and at some point, beyond the breaking point.

2. Organizational Factors

• The project team’s maturity and cohesiveness are important factors to consider. With a high performing team with a strong understanding of project management, most of the lesser challenges would essentially go away through superior problem solving and teaming skills. But the same issues confronting a less mature team would often result in bigger obstacles.
• The sponsoring organization’s culture, processes, and competencies are important considerations. The “fitness” and “alignment” of decision making and governance can have a major impact. For example, if key decisions take weeks or months to make, then iterative approaches like Scrum are likely to be suboptimal and directly impact the time required to make key decisions at the start of the project.
• The maturity of the project management and the appropriateness of methodology can also be an important factor. If a team that excels in traditional project management is coerced to be more agile, especially without the support of the underlying processes, then what likely happens is a hodgepodge of approaches creating chaos and confusion.
• Finally, all organizations have some level of politics. Unless they are well managed, conflicts of interest and priorities often appear at the onset of projects, delaying and possibly even killing projects.

3. Environmental Factors

• Environmental factors are considerations external to the project and the organization working on the project, which on a large and complex project can be quite numerous. For well-defined projects in which the underlying technology is mature, the environmental impact can be well estimated and managed. But for projects that are truly innovative or with a high degree of competition, environmental impact can be more significant.
• Examples of environmental factors include:
  • Social economic – For example, society’s acceptance of artificial intelligence in driverless vehicles, even if the technology is proven. Or, the state of the economy.
  • Industry and competitive – The amount of competition in an industry.
  • Regulatory – Governmental involvement, regulations, guidelines, and even industry standards can impact how projects are defined and thus create additional concerns at project initiation.

 

Implications if not handling it correctly

Activities in the fuzzy front end are usually difficult to anticipate, understand, and determine. Some project managers underestimate the seriousness of fuzzy front ends. Their attitude may be to underemphasize planning since it’s so chaotic. They may not have a vision for the project flow or create a full project plan to deeply understand customer needs and requirements. Some may even hide behind the “agile” methodology so there are excuses for weak analysis, little documentation, everything “goes” attitude toward scope definition, and ultimately a poor foundation for the project. This can surely cause serious gaps and misunderstandings of customer needs. Accordingly, potentials risks and issues are not identified well. And project delays, risk mitigation alternatives and resource allocation are not done properly either. As a result, chances of project failure and customer dissatisfaction are high.

 

Good Practices for Managing the Fuzzy Front End

With often many choices to make at the onset of projects, project managers should drive to a degree of certainty as quickly and as efficiently as possible.  Here are ten good practices to consider – to drive toward stability and certainty:

1. Vision – Develop a clear direction and compelling future for the outcome for the project. Having a strong vision anchor the project team toward a common set of objectives
2. Champion – Seek one or more change champion(s) who can engage key stakeholders, develop them into willing and collaborative partners, drive them toward achieving the vision, and fight the good battles.
3. Sponsorship – Make sure there is executive management involvement that provides coverage on contentious issues. For larger projects, consider establishing robust governance to guide key decisions
4. Customer – Involve customers and end users early on, to refine product ideas and project implementation processes
5. Process – Identify and implement a project management approach early on, to instill process rigor early. But also be willing to change as innovative projects can have many detours
6. Collaboration – Perform outreach activities with key internal resources, such as functional organizations, to create a dynamic environment for idea exchanges and mutual collaboration
7. Lessons Learned– Examine important lessons from the past similar endeavors and plan to address them in current projects. Whenever possible, seek expert advice from the previous project manager and other important stakeholders
8. Prioritization – Innovative and complex projects often have a long list of desired project outcomes. Spend time early on to organize, categorize, and prioritize the wish list items. Draw a firm line between the essential components versus more discretionary features.
9. Alignment – Examine the consistency and agreement of the project goals and outcomes with the product objectives and organizational goals. Aligning goals are vital, especially when making intricate trade-offs decisions.
10. Communication – Project managers easily spend 80% or more of their time on communication. A good practice is to conduct “kick-off meetings” as frequently as required to orient the team, onboard new members, and communicate the goals, challenges, and the work remaining to complete the project satisfactorily.

 

Six Steps to Managing the Fuzzy Front End

There are many ways to manage challenging projects. The six steps below provide a simplified overview of managing projects with fuzzy front end problems:

1. Evaluate project situation.

Evaluate both internal and external considerations surrounding the project, organization, and environmental factors. Internal are largely focused on the immediate and direct considerations such as customers, team capabilities, resources, budgets, etc. External are the environmental factors that are beyond the PM’s control but still have an influence. Develop an early perspective on the challenges ahead.

 

2. Determine project success criteria, and consider developing three sets of success criteria:

• Minimum threshold for success – This is the bare minimum threshold for success. In general, project manager should develop plans that have 85% or higher confidence of achieving this minimum threshold, even though the specific percentage depends on organizations and their risk tolerance. For example, the minimum threshold for successful adoption of the new technology is achieving a Net Prompter Score (NPS) of 25 (on a scale of -100 to +100) with an average of 3 or higher (on a scale of 1 to 5) for the sub-component scores.
• Realistic criteria for success – This is the most realistic expectation for success. Project managers should build their project plans to achieve this. In general, project managers should have 75% or higher confidence of achieving the realistic criteria. The realistic NPS is 50 with none of the sub-component scores below 3 with an average of 4 (on a scale of 1-5).
• Stretch goals or wildly successful – This is by definition “stretched”, and generally, it should be sub-divided into smaller components. For example, the satisfaction on training is 4.5, exceeding the realistic expectation of 4.

 

3. Collect customer / sponsor insights

Work with customers, sponsors and other key stakeholders to understand their goals and expectations, challenges and hesitancies, and opportunities for improvement. More important, the very act of engaging customers in a professional and sincere fashion builds rapport and trust. Use this opportunity to evaluate and refine the three key factors outlined above: project, organization, and environment.

 

4. Develop strategic foresight and prioritize requirements

Projects that have severe fuzzy front end problems are nearly always complex, difficult, innovative and probably sizeable and political. This means that there are considerable conflicts and disagreements, especially at the start of projects. Project managers should work with the key stakeholders and address these conflicts openly, transparently, and collaboratively to achieve agreements or consensus. Ideally, the project manager and even the sponsor are neutral with the primary interest of successfully completing the project.

 

5. Determine implementation approach (e.g. waterfall, agile, process rigor)

Based on the earlier analysis, identify the most suitable implementation approach that will help the project succeed. A good implementation approach must consider the three key factors discussed earlier: project, organization, and environment. Depending on organizational and project management maturity, it may be possible to develop a tailored method for the project.

Once the method is determined, develop a comprehensive project plan based on engaging and collaborating with the core team and stakeholders.

 

6. Execute the project plan

Often the most difficult challenge is taking the plunge. By following the approach outlined here and planned thoroughly, it is important to take the first step. No good work would be accomplished by paralysis of analysis and planning, and thus, it’s time to take action.

Good project managers know the importance of balance, between stability and a degree of rigidity with flexibility. Stability is essential to provide consistency and predictability; rigidity is important for discipline and careful execution; flexibility is also required especially when the reality requires making changes. Project managers should rarely be dogmatic about approaches, processes, tools, and techniques. Instead, they need to find ways to smooth over competing interests and ways of implementation to achieve optimal execution.

 

Conclusion:

To be able to manage fuzzy front ends, one must be able to ask the right questions and be able to absorb the value behind large amounts of collected qualitative and quantitative data. The uncertainty and complexity of this early stage makes “Fuzzy Front End” a very descriptive expression and a very complicated phase for project managers. This article introduces the concepts, provides an anatomy of the situation, discusses the implication of poorly managing the problem, suggests good practices to address the problem, and prescriptively outlines a method of tackling the problem of fuzzy front end.

 

References:

Frishammar, J., & Florén, H. (2014, March 24). Achieving Success in the Fuzzy Front End Phase of Innovation. Retrieved February 25, 2019, from http://www.innovationmanagement.se/2010/10/20/achieving-success-in-the-fuzzy-front-end-phase-of-innovation/

Mootee, I. (2011, March/April). Strategic innovation and the fuzzy front end. Retrieved February 25, 2019, from https://iveybusinessjournal.com/publication/strategic-innovation-and-the-fuzzy-front-end/

Evans, G. (2013, January 28). Project Management in the Fuzzy Front-End. Retrieved February 25, 2019, from https://www.slideshare.net/gmevans1/white-paper-pm