How do I rescue a failing project?

According to Gartner, 80% of projects fail. 80%!!!!

When I read that I nearly fell off my chair. Recently I was asked to come back to a previous client of mine, and help with a project that just didn't seem to be going anywhere. They had a huge estimate (between a year and two years, they wanted 3 months) and they didn't really know where to begin.

I love problems like this, they're really challenging and so rewarding when you solve them. Here's what I did to get the result. OKRs. The first thing I noticed was there was no real direction for the project, how do we know when we've solved the problem? How do we know we're even going in the right direction?

OKRs are a great way to structure your goals as they give you not only the destination (the objective) but also information about progress along the way. It's like secret sauce when it comes to assessing a project's health.

Here's an example:

Objective: "We want our Customer's checkout experience to feel like shopping in Harrods not Aldi".

Key results:

1. "To go from a 30% drop out rate to 5%".
2. "To go from 3 star average review to 5 Star".
3. "To go from 10 minute journey through the process to 30 seconds".

The above example allows your teams, who have all the knowledge of that process, to suggestion ideas (or "Initiatives" in OKR speak) to make a dent on those results. The great thing is, you can see if they're having an impact, it's not guesswork anymore and there's also a nice side benefit of increased team engagement and they have a hand in getting to that goal/objective.