The challenge management from a long-term, expensive project is the level of risk. This is both due to the amount of money required and the amount of time required before benefits are seen. As a result, some projects may not be approved.

A large process improvement project that is expected to take years to complete and cost millions of dollars will be viewed by many management teams as very risky because of the time, cost and potential risk of not attaining any real benefits. Even with a good business case, management must weigh investing much needed money and time on this project vs. other projects that may seem more likely to deliver the expected benefits in a shorter period of time.

A different approach is to break large projects into incremental phases that are discrete building blocks of investments, activities and deliverables. Take a large project and split it up so the first phase lays the initial foundation. Then the second phase builds on that and so on. In a sense, the large original project can be viewed as a program comprised of a number of smaller related projects that when combined will achieve the original objective(s).

By doing this, there is one vision ranging from inception to end state. It also reduces costs of each phase. Also, if the benefits do not prove out or corrections are needed then they can be made prior to the next project being finalized and funded.

Building on our earlier process improvement example, imagine that instead of trying to propose everything in one fell swoop the project sponsor keeps the large project definition as a roadmap to explain what needs to be done and why at a high level. Then, he or she identifies processes based on enabling and/or protecting organizational goals by selecting those most needed first, taking any dependencies into account of course.