Getting It Done

The key to BGI's approach is a sharp and well-defined separation of responsibilities. According to BGI, any project can be broken down into five functional roles, each of which represents a specific task: the project sponsor (the company principal who holds the project's purse strings), the business owner (the day-to-day decision maker), the project manager (the deadline expert), the technological and functional staff, and the support staff.

BGI managers are quick to acknowledge that, on first glance, their model looks like a parody of a management-seminar handout. But, they say, don't laugh. It works. Most successful projects have followed this model, Drobny says, and most failed projects have violated it -- by trying to eliminate a functional role or, more commonly, by trying to combine two different functional roles. The model's power, he says, "comes from letting people step back and see their projects from the outside."

BGI has learned that the perspective that its model provides is almost as important as the model itself. Over the years, the 29-year-old firm, which manages $786 billion in retirement funds, gradually developed an extremely conservative culture, one that favored lengthy, in-depth analyses. "We're not a culture of risk takers," concedes Diane Lumley, 37, the company's manager of client relations. "We don't think that it's a great thing to make mistakes and learn from them, and we do punish failure." But BGI's "risk control" produced a crippling paralysis: The firm became so cautious that projects weren't getting out of the blocks, and the firm met its deadlines only when it hired outside consultants to serve as project managers.

So Drobny began probing the anatomy of BGI projects, and he soon discerned a pattern: In case after case, two job functions -- project manager and business owner -- were being lumped together and handled by the same person. Sometimes, that person was the business owner -- a firm principal with financial expertise but with few specific skills in managing projects. In other cases, it was the project manager -- an employee who, though efficient, lacked the necessary qualifications or authorization to make expert decisions.

In both cases, the result was the same: inaction. As soon as a project hit a snag, Drobny says, business owners tended to default to their professional comfort zone -- expert analysis -- and, in doing so, delayed the project. And when project managers needed to make a tough decision, they either made the wrong decision -- because they were operating beyond their expertise -- or they slammed on the brakes until they could find a qualified decision maker.

The firm was losing time -- and the confidence of its teams. "When you're just a 'project manager,' and not an 'expert,' no one believes that you know what you're talking about or trusts that you'll make the right move," says Jennifer Campbell, 30, a principal and project manager at BGI. "So everything takes longer."

It was clear to Drobny that a successful project needed both a business owner and a project manager. Separating those two roles would free up business owners to analyze options and would allow project managers to focus on deliverables and deadlines "without worrying about having to make decisions," Drobny says.

Although initially Drobny focused on project managers and business owners, he soon discovered other functional roles -- such as sponsors, technological staff, and administrative staff -- whose contributions were also overlooked or misunderstood. Take, for example, sponsors. Sponsors ensure that a project has adequate funding. Just as important, they make sure that the project fits with the firm's strategic objectives and is therefore less likely to be abandoned after it is launched. Yet Drobny discovered that many projects were being started without a clearly defined sponsor. The same was true of business owners and project managers. "You'd ask who was filling these roles," says Drobny, "and people would say, 'No one.' "

BGI's project taxonomy has given the firm a model that it can use as both a proscriptive and a diagnostic tool. Managers with an idea for a project can use the model as a sort of checklist to make sure that they have all of the necessary elements before beginning implementation. Those with a failing project can match their experience against the model to figure out what went wrong. "You can walk right through the chain," Drobny says. "Running out of money? Maybe you don't have a strong sponsor. Missing deadlines? Perhaps you don't have a distinct project manager."

Not surprisingly, BGI is trying to do a better job of cultivating project managers and of keeping their function "clean" of other work. "People who do well in their jobs are asked to manage projects, but too often, they're also expected to keep working on whatever it was that they were doing before," says Heather Davis, 29, BGI chief of staff and a former project manager. "So you need an owner who can be your advocate when day-to-day business gets in the way."