Half Double Methodology Handbook: Projects in half the time with double the impact

Preface

This is a book about project leadership. A book written for passionate leaders and practitioners, finding themselves in roles as project owners and sponsors, project leaders, or project management officers. For people who would like to lead projects to impact faster and with a higher level of engagement. People who dream of making the business world radically more innovative and agile.

In 2013, three such passionate project practitioners met up at a café in Copenhagen. All in different positions at the time: one leading a management consulting firm, one heading a project management office in a large international organization, and one researching nationwide success factors for project work. However, they shared one common denominator; a deeply rooted frustration regarding the low success rate of projects and a burning notion that something wasn’t right in the field of project management.

The aspiration to solve this problem led to the initiation of a small brain trust of 21 high-caliber project practitioners. 21 people who together wrote an article, 12 leading stars for project management. The article became the fundament for a consortium consisting of the Danish Industry Foundation, a leading project management consultancy, three universities, 17 pilot project partners, and a community of over a thousand passionate practitioners.

The article and the consortium also functioned as the basis for the application to the Danish Industry Foundation which was brave enough to fund Project Half Double. A funding offered on the basis of a promise: to develop an agile hybrid methodology in and with practice and academia. A new approach to projects that could enhance our ability to innovate, develop, and deliver new solutions to the world. An agile methodology freely available to all that could be applied across project types, industries, and national barriers.

This book was written to share the learnings, results, and impact of this promise. The methodology has been developed and tested in practice. We have seen it prove itself out there, and we’re ready to share it with the world. To inspire more practitioners to enhance the focus on impact, flow, and leadership in their projects. To fight the low success rate of projects. To help drastically enhance productivity. Productivity being more impact with fewer resources. Meaning more innovation and improvements for less. At our core, we believe this to be the single greatest opportunity for business and for society in the Western world today. The trend is clear. More and more of the work we do will be conducted through projects by white collar workers paid high salaries to conduct one-off tasks. The change in the Western workforce has been a remarkable reflection of this. Even minor improvements can have a massive impact on a large scale. And we dare to hope that this can help change the world for the better.

As you start experimenting with the ideas of Half Double, you might find yourself asking more questions than you did initially. Simply because in many ways, it introduces a paradigm shift compared to the way many of us are used to running our projects. But hopefully, you will find the answer to many of these questions here. The book elaborates on the core ideas of the Half Double methodology and shares stories from the pilot projects where this methodology was developed. Stories that highlight how companies such as VELUX, SAS, GN Audio, Siemens Wind Power, and Lantmännen Unibake translated the mindset and toolset into their world – their local culture, practices, and language. It also highlights some of the challenges they encountered, and how they overcame them.

Across all pilots, however, there was one dominating success factor: leadership. More specifically, the active involvement of the project owner and the project leader’s ability to lead a complex system of people all the way through the project journey. Therefore, leadership is both at the very core of Half Double, as well as the enabler to creating impact with the rest of the methods and tools. Which means that you, regardless of the role you have in the project, will need to focus on the leadership of people, rather than the management of systems in order to gain any impact from the Half Double methodology.

The journey to capturing the potential of project-based work has only just started. And we continue to experiment and learn as we encounter new projects, organizations, and passionate practitioners. So, if you have insights and experiences to share on how to reduce the time to impact in your projects, we would love to hear them. And we dare to hope that you will find inspiration in this book to help you on your journey.

THOMAS HOFMAN-BANG

CEO, The Danish Industry Foundation

CHRISTINA SEJR PEDERSEN

Head of Program Management Office, Triple Ring Technologies

NIELS AHRENGOT

Managing Partner, Implement Consulting Group

PER SVEJVIG

Associate Professor, Head of Project Management Research Group, PhD at Aarhus University

The Half Double methodology — in short

Before we dive into the background and details of the book, let’s establish a shared understanding of the concept it is all built on.

The starting point for working with Half Double is to be aware that it is a methodology, not a method. In other words, we reject the notion that you can apply one method in the same way in all situations. Instead, it is a set of principles that must be translated to suit your particular needs. Principles that must be adapted to the situation at hand, to the project you are currently working on, and within your organizational context.

The model to the right summarizes these principles - with connected methods and tools.

At the very core of the methodology, we have the three core elements: Impact, Flow, and Leadership. Each core element puts forward a principle for how to lead projects.

Illustration IMPACT

WE IMPLEMENT PROJECTS TO CREATE IMPACT, AND WE WANT TO REDUCE THE TIME TO IMPACT. WE VALUE IMPACT ABOVE SCOPE, COST, AND TIME

Illustration FLOW

PROJECT MANAGEMENT SHOULD FOCUS ON CREATING A FAST FLOW OF IDEAS, LEARNING, RESULTS, AND IMPACT. WE VALUE FLOW AND PROGRESS OVER MULTITASKING

Illustration LEADERSHIP

RESULTS ARE CREATED BY PEOPLE. WE PUT PEOPLE BEFORE SYSTEMS

Each principle is directly linked to a method – a proposed approach, procedure, or process for bringing the principles to life in practice.

And each method is supported by a tool – a specific instrument aimed at promoting implementation.

In the outer circle, we have local translation. Here, we propose three methods for adapting Impact, Flow, and Leadership to suit local cutures and practices. The farther we move out from the core elements toward the outer circles, the more flexible we can be regarding which approach and tools to employ. Get further insight into the three core elements in chapter 2.

How to read this book with minimum effort and maximum impact

This book is organized according to the structure of the Half Double methodology. In chapter 1, we provide some background and a brief review of developments in management and project management.

Chapter 2 describes the center of the circle, the core elements of the approach, and what they entail.

In chapters 3, 4, and 5, we explore each element in-depth, describing the specific methods and tools designed to bring the focus areas to life in practice. Each chapter is structured with a section for each method and the associated tool followed by a relevant case story. This makes the book easy to navigate and lets you focus on exactly what you need to read in your given situation.

Chapter 6, Local Translation, is organized in the same way and covers how to handle the transition from your current project approach to implementation of the Half Double approach.

Finally, chapter 7 focuses on how to scale Half Double to the entire organization to ensure an effective project portfolio containing projects with intensive resource allocation and short duration — we call them short and fat projects.

Remember that you can read more and download the tools for free at www.projecthalfdouble.com – it’s all open source!

Find your way around the book

Chapter 0

INTRO

Preface

Half Double — in short

How to read this book with minimum effort and maximum impact

Is this book for you?

Chapter 1

THE FUTURE CALLS FOR INNOVATION AND AGILITY

The past was built on efficiency and optimization

What does the future look like?

The project society

The Half Double sweet spot

Chapter 2

THE HALF DOUBLE METHODOLOGY — UNFOLDED

The three core elements of Half Double

The Impact principle

The Flow principle

The Leadership principle

The local translation principle

Chapter 3

IMPACT

Impact case

Case: GN Audio

Impact solution design

Case: GN Audio

Pulse check

Case: VELUX

Chapter 4

FLOW

Co-location design

Case: SIEMENS Wind Power

Visual planning

Case: GN Audio

Rhythm in key events

Case: Danfoss

Chapter 5

LEADERSHIP

Active ownership

Case: Sebastian

Collaborative leadership

Case: Mikael

Reflective and adaptive mindset

Case: Christina

Chapter 6

LOCAL TRANSLATION

Build a Half Double mindset

Case: SAS

Customize governance

Case: GN Audio

Anchor the Half Double practice

Case: VELUX

Chapter 7

PORTFOLIO LEADERSHIP

Method 1: Make strategy and portfolio fit to create strategic impact

Method 2: Short and fat portfolio with frequent strategic adjustment

Method 3: Portfolio leadership team and ownership

Chapter 8

APPENDIX

Half Double is a complete agile methodology

Scientific research exploring Half Double

References and sources

The consortium

The contributors

The authors

Is this book for you?

TRY TO SEE IF YOU CAN CHECK OFF ONE OR MORE OF THESE BOXES

YOU ARE A PASSIONATE PROJECT PRACTITIONER AT HEART

YOU ARE DRIVEN BY THE NEED TO CREATE REAL IMPACT AND ARE WILLING TO TAKE UNTRADITIONAL MEASURES

YOU ARE ALWAYS THINKING THAT THERE MUST BE BETTER WAYS TO LEAD PROJECTS

IF YOU CAN, THEN YOU’RE PART OF A MOVEMENT SPREADING ACROSS THE GLOBE.

A MOVEMENT THAT IS WILLING TO QUESTION THE DOMINANT PROJECT MANAGEMENT PRACTICES AND IS EAGER TO IDENTIFY

NEW WAYS TO ENHANCE IMPACT

Know you’ve never been more important as a project leader than you are right now

Project management is rapidly becoming more and more important. Most of the development work we do today is executed through projects, and up to 40% of an industrialized country’s GNP derives from this work form.(1)

As an attempt to accommodate for this, a tsunami of concepts has been launched for project management, program management, portfolio management, and project maturity. Still, only 35% of projects are considered to be successful.(2) Within academia, we also seem to have missed the mark. Out of 1,279 articles published in the field of project management since 1983, there are only 74 articles set out to rethink project management, and only seven articles describe ways to actually do it.(3)

So where do we go from here? Research shows that methodology alone accounts for only about 6% of project successes.(4) Lack of leadership, on the other hand, is considered to account for 74% of the projects that fail.(5)

What we conclude from this is that our profession needs change. Not just a change of tools and techniques, but a complete change of mindset and approach to leadership. We need people who dare to think differently, who dare to take the lead. We need more people like you. Our hope is that with your experience, energy, and courage, you can change the way project management is conducted. More than 1,400 practitioners have developed the ideas behind the Half Double approach, and we invite you to join us on this exciting journey – with this handbook as your guide.

THROUGHOUT HUMAN HISTORY, GREAT PROGRESS HAS BEEN MADE EVERY TIME WE QUESTIONED OUR BASIC ASSUMPTIONS ...

This triggered our curiosity, and we asked ourselves the following questions in our quest for radically improving the way we work:

WHAT ASSUMPTIONS HAVE LED TO OUR INCREASE IN PROSPERITY?

DO THESE ASSUMPTIONS STILL HOLD IN TODAY’S FAST-PACED SOCIETY?

COULD NEW PRINCIPLES ACCELERATE PROGRESS AND GROWTH GOING FORWARD?

The past was built on efficiency, optimization, and perfection in operations

For thousands of