Tag: business

On Budget, On Time, Almost Never

Most projects don’t fail at the end. They fail at the beginning. The people involved just don’t know it yet.

How bad is it? From a database of 16,000 projects, only 0.5% were completed on budget, on time, and on benefit.

These numbers come from a book called How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner. I just read it, and it should be required reading for anyone starting any project. The authors focus on big infrastructure projects, yet the lessons apply to projects of any size.

The book reminded me of all the failed projects I’ve witnessed in my career and how they were doomed from the beginning.

It starts with a question most teams never ask: why are we doing this project? Is it mission critical, or are we just following a trend? AI strategy projects come to mind. Everyone wants one. No one is asking the hard question of why.

Then comes planning. How much will the project cost and how long will it take? Usually the answer is a number pulled out of thin air without so much as a benchmark. People tend to assume that their project is unique, that it will somehow take less time, cost less money, and produce better results than similar projects undertaken in the past.

Who has not heard that story before?

And once the project starts moving, there is rarely a system in place to alert anyone that it’s running off course from the beginning.

I took a job with a company that was implementing a new ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system due to go live a few months after my first day. This project was one of the reasons I took the job. It pointed to a company that was serious about process improvement and growth.

Two months after I joined, the project was cancelled.

It was not a total surprise. After onboarding, I hit the ground running participating in the testing phase and quickly noticed that the project was not where it should be. I was not the only one with that thought, so leadership hired a consulting firm to audit the progress.

The project was already a year behind schedule and a million dollars over budget. The consulting firm confirmed that there was no way it could go live in a few months. Their estimate: one additional year and one more million to complete. That would have put the project at three years and three million dollars, as long as everything went right from that point on.

The project was dead.

I was full of questions, so I reached out to the most senior person in the department.

Question: Who from the accounting department was part of the implementation team?

Answer: Why would the accounting team be part of that?

The problems started to become clear. No one from the accounting team had participated in any aspect of the project. The very expensive consultants were supposed to deliver a turnkey solution.

Question: Was there anyone from the company who functioned as the bridge between the company and the consulting firm?

Answer: The IT Director.

Question: And was the IT Director removed from his day-to-day duties and allowed to focus on the project?

Answer: Of course not.

This project was never going to happen.

No one had asked whether the original budget and timeline were even realistic. In my experience, any transformation project that doesn’t plan for at least three years is setting itself up for failure. No internal team had been assigned to the project. The very expensive consultants were trusted to deliver a solution for a business they didn’t understand. And the one person designated as the bridge between the company and the consultants was doing it as a side project on top of their actual job.

The real cost wasn’t just the money or the time. For people like me, who took the job because the project signaled ambition and seriousness, the company went from forward-looking to stuck in the past overnight. The project didn’t just fail. It told everyone paying attention what kind of company this actually was.

A million things can go wrong during a project. But it is usually just a few things early on, the questions nobody ask, the resources nobody commits, the warnings nobody builds a system to catch, that decide whether it fails or succeeds.

DOE (Depends on Experience)

DOE. Depends on Experience.

They showed up on a recruiter’s LinkedIn post advertising opportunities at an “amazing” company. Senior Accountant or Manager, DOE. Senior Accounting Manager or Controller, DOE. Salary ranges also DOE.

Why?

Title and salary should not depend on the experience of the candidate. They should depend on the nature and requirements of the job. I have discussed title inflation before, so I will try not to repeat myself.

There is a moat the size of an ocean between a Senior Accounting Manager and a Controller. So which is it? Is the role a Senior Manager job or a Controller job?

If you need a Controller, hire a Controller, and pay for a Controller. Hiring a Senior Accounting Manager and expecting them to somehow do the job of a Controller is setting both the candidate and the company up for failure.

You’ll get Senior Accounting Manager output, and everything else will fall through the cracks.

But the candidate can grow into the role, right? Someone might argue.

How? I ask.

A company that can’t tell the difference between a Senior Accounting Manager and a Controller doesn’t have the accounting leadership to develop one into the other. So who exactly is going to grow this candidate into the role?

A recruiter reached out to me the other day for a “Controller track, Accounting Manager” role.

I laughed. Where is the track?

These imaginary tracks sound less like a well-defined road and more like a self-guided tour through a forest. No map, no compass. Good luck getting to the other side.

I used to work with a woman whose title was Senior Manager, Fixed Assets. Fixed assets, for the non-accountants, are the physical assets of a company. Think equipment, land, buildings, vehicles. Things the company uses to create value.

She was six years away from retirement and wanted to hire her replacement. The role she was really hiring for was Junior Accountant.

Her pitch to new hires: work hard and in six years you can sit in my chair and have my job. She hired two young people who quit in quick succession, unimpressed with what she had to offer.

She then hired an older, and as she put it, more “mature” candidate who would have the patience to wait his turn.

I pointed out that a forty-year-old with over a decade in accounting accepting a Junior Accountant position was possibly a red flag.

She had to terminate him after a week because after five days he still had not managed to learn how to turn on his computer.

She couldn’t understand why there were no qualified takers for this great opportunity. Why weren’t more people willing to take a junior role with low pay that would eventually transition into a middle manager role with possibly still low pay?

This sounds like a joke, but it gets worse. Even that laughable opportunity didn’t actually exist.

Six years is an eternity in corporate America. The company could have been bought and sold many times over. Her department could have been outsourced to a third-party firm, which I saw happen to other teams during my tenure. Or the company could have decided to move the whole function upstream to corporate.

This was not her company, soit was not her track to promise.

It’s time to stop. Stop advertising two roles as one. Stop posting senior roles at junior prices. Stop promising career paths that don’t exist and that aren’t yours to offer.

This is the role. This is the pay. We hope you grow with us, but right now we need this job filled and we need the right person to fill it.

That’s not cold. That’s honest. And honest is what candidates deserve.

The Math is Not Mathing

Accounting Manager is the single worst job in accounting.

That was my comment on someone else’s LinkedIn post about what Accounting Managers do. It received thousands of impressions. Apparently, I’m not alone in my belief.

What I didn’t say in that comment is why. Not just why the job is bad, but why it matters. Because the damage isn’t limited to the people in the role. It reaches everyone around them.

There is a concept in organizational development called the Leadership Pipeline. The idea is simple: manager roles are linchpin positions. Without them, organizations can’t sustain themselves long-term.

The literature is clear that the most difficult career transition is the one from Managing the Self to Managing Others. The people who get promoted are the ones with the strongest technical skills. The ones with the interpersonal and relationship skills needed to succeed as a manager get left behind. What makes you good at the first job is not what makes you good at the next one.

Still, this is not an insurmountable obstacle. Training can go a long way.

But of course, that’s where the real failure happens.

I remember being a first-time manager and having my Director reprimand me for scheduling too many training sessions with my team. They should know, she would say. My response: how? Who taught them?

She didn’t have an answer because there wasn’t one. Nobody had taught them. Nobody had taught me either. The company expected people to become managers overnight and then blamed them when they struggled. The training budget was zero. The patience was less than that.

A less experienced person would have taken that feedback and stopped the sessions. I doubled down.

But most new managers don’t push back. They absorb the message: training is a waste of time, your team should already know, figure it out. And then they spend the next several years managing by instinct instead of by skill, burning out, and wondering why the job feels impossible.

Over the years, I’ve had friends take steps back in their careers because they didn’t want to ‘babysit’ a team. I’ve never liked that comparison, but I understand where it comes from. When you’re given a team with no training on how to lead them, managing starts to feel like supervising instead of leading.

But here’s what people miss: the team feels it too. Nobody wants to be managed by someone who is clearly overwhelmed, clearly untrained, and clearly just trying to survive until the next close. Reports can tell the difference between a leader who is developing them and a manager who is just keeping track of them. When both sides feel like the relationship is broken, it transforms from a people problem to a design problem.

And the math confirms it. The increase in pay from individual contributor to manager is rarely proportional to the increase in stress and responsibility. You take on twice the workload, lose your overtime eligibility, become accountable for other people’s output, and get a raise that barely covers the difference. The math is not mathing.

This is the first consequence that people feel in their careers, long before the pipeline runs dry. The job stops being worth it.

And young people have noticed.

A little more than a year ago, I was having lunch with a group of junior and staff accountants  from another team. The conversation turned to the career ladder, and every single young person at the table said they didn’t want to ever become managers.

They saw their own manager and thought: too much work for not enough money.

Gen Z is choosing to stay in individual contributor roles. The more entrepreneurial ones are pursuing side hustles and their own path. The famous 5-9 after their 9-5.

They are not wrong.

The real question is what happens 10 years from now when there isn’t a pipeline of experienced managers who know how to build and lead a team. What happens when we forget how to get things done through others? What awaits us when the institutional knowledge of how to develop people, run a close with a team of varying skill levels, and turn a group of individuals into a functioning unit has simply disappeared because nobody wanted the job?

The optimist in me thinks that when faced with that crisis, companies will finally invest in real managerial training and build compensation structures that make the role worth taking.

The pessimist in me looks at current leadership, at how they’re letting things deteriorate in real time, and thinks that by the time anyone notices the pipeline is empty, it will already be too late to fill it. And when that happens, we won’t just be missing managers. We’ll be missing the people who know how to fix the problem.

When Everything is a Priority

In a sea of “tell me about yourself,” someone asked an interesting question at an interview the other day.

The hiring manager asked me how I prioritize when everything is a priority. In this era of doing more with less and fast-moving environments, it is a fair question, and it started a meaningful conversation about how we work. It’s a question most people answer with instinct. There’s a better way.

When prioritizing, I use three pillars: risk, visibility, and materiality.

Risk.

In accounting, there are areas of the financials that have a higher propensity to cause harm if things are missed or not kept under control. Revenue recognition and accruals at reporting period ends are common examples. These areas tend to be the focus of compliance efforts. A useful signal: if an area comes up time and time again during audits, it is probably high risk. The question to ask: what happens if I get this wrong? If the answer scares you, that’s where you start.

Visibility.

Leadership will always have one or two KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that they track closely while monitoring growth or the lack of it. Maybe it is a metric that once caused a major issue in a senior leader’s career, and they’ve learned to watch it closely ever since. You’ll know what these are quickly. They will be the first or second thing asked about during review meetings. It keeps you from getting caught off guard. When leadership asks, and they will, you need to have the answer. The people who advance prioritize based on what leadership is actually measuring.

Materiality.

Materiality is the accounting concept that only information significant enough to influence stakeholder decisions needs to be highlighted in financial reports. Most companies set a quantitative materiality threshold, a minimum dollar amount that triggers further review or action. If an issue falls below that threshold, it won’t necessarily be ignored, but it won’t be prioritized either. In accounting terms, “it is not material.” This is the pillar that gives you permission to say: this can wait. Most people never give themselves that permission.

These three pillars often overlap. When something is risky, visible, and material, that is where you focus first. No debate needed.

But here is what I find interesting: these are accounting concepts, but the logic behind them applies far beyond accounting.

When choosing what to prioritize in any context, ask yourself: What is the risk of not doing this? Do the people who matter, your team, your boss, your family, consider this important? And will this decision meaningfully change the outcome, or is it noise?

Those three questions can cut through most of the paralysis that comes with competing priorities. Not everything that feels urgent is risky. Not everything that is visible is material. And not everything that is material is visible. Knowing the difference is where good prioritization starts. And in a sea where everything feels urgent, that might be the only thing that keeps you afloat.

The Questions That Were Never Asked

I could tell something was wrong the moment my friend picked up the phone. She had just spent a “ton of money” paying someone to rewrite her LinkedIn profile and they had done a terrible job. A bad, no good, horrible job whose only use would be as kindling for a fire (I’m paraphrasing here).

I was surprised since she had used a professional. Let me take a look, I said. Maybe I could help.

The package included a resume, executive bio, and a LinkedIn profile with instructions about how to populate the site. I read it all and thought… it was perfectly okay. It was professional and well written, easy to read, full of the buzzy keywords. I started to wonder what the real problem was.

I decided it was an issue of misaligned goals. I asked my friend some questions to find out.

Questions like: What is the main purpose of this profile? What do you want people to take away when looking at it? What kind of tone do you want to convey? Who is your main audience? Besides company names and titles, what do you want to communicate about your career?

She was surprised by the questions because her LinkedIn profile writer never asked them. But more importantly, she herself had not thought about them. She asked for a couple of days to sit with it.

Once she came back with answers, I had the clarity I needed to do a rewrite. I sent it to her a few days later, and she loved it. This was finally what she wanted. What she wanted all along.

She thanked me for all my hard work. What she didn’t know was how little work I had done. I pretty much changed the point of view and did some surgical rewrites, but overall, the foundation was the same package she had paid for.

This made me think about how many projects and pieces of work get tossed every day because we don’t ask simple questions about the end goal at the beginning. About how we discard good work just because it doesn’t match the fuzzy picture we have in our minds.

The professional who helped my friend never asked about the ultimate goal. She assumed it was the same as everyone’s: maximize recruiter engagement. And she delivered exactly that. A well-put-together yet generic result.

My friend failed to see the potential in what she already had. A few strategic questions and a few precise rewrites were all it took to get to the desired outcome.

Good work gets thrown away every day. Not because it’s wrong, but because nobody asks what “right” is supposed to look like.