Why Most Projects Fail: The Illusion of Control
A lot of projects fail because they are built on extremely detailed specifications. Companies draft exhaustive plans, defining every single step in crystal-clear detail. This approach is meant to provide clarity, but in reality, it leads to inefficiencies.
Why? Because everything changes—organizations evolve, market demands shift, and new technologies emerge. Yet, teams stick to rigid plans, afraid to deviate. The result? Projects take longer, cost more, and often fail to deliver real value.
A better approach is to stay flexible. Focus on the next step rather than trying to predict every step ahead of time. Understand the goal, move forward incrementally, and adjust as needed. It’s harder to estimate costs and timelines this way, but in the long run, it’s far more effective.
The Consulting Industry’s Unspoken Truth
Consultants and implementers often avoid this flexible approach. Why? Because they rely on detailed estimations to justify their pricing. They break down projects into endless tasks, padding timelines and budgets.
For example, a task that takes five minutes might be estimated at four hours. Why? Because they add testing, documentation, and buffer time. While these steps are important, they don’t always need to be applied to every minor task in isolation. This approach inflates costs and extends deadlines unnecessarily.
The truth is, many consultants are scared of lower estimates because they bill based on time. If they optimize their processes, their revenue decreases—unless they switch to a value-based model.
The Principal-Agent Alignment Problem
This issue ties into a fundamental humanity problem: the Principal-Agent Alignment Problem, which applies here as follows:
- The Principal (client) wants high-quality work done efficiently and at a reasonable cost.
- The Agent (consultant or implementation partner) wants to maximize revenue, often by extending timelines and charging for additional work.
These misaligned interests lead to inefficiencies, overcharging, and frustration on both sides.
A better approach? Consultants should tie their revenue to the value they provide rather than billing strictly by time. This way, they align their incentives with the client’s goals.
Moving from Services to Value-Based Products
Many service companies recognize this issue and want to switch to a product-based model. Why? Because service-based revenue is not recurring. If a consulting firm makes $10 million in one year, they need to sell another $10 million worth of services the next year just to maintain revenue. It’s exhausting and unsustainable.
Instead, service providers are looking for ways to create recurring revenue streams by offering products that continuously deliver value. But here’s the catch:
Most service companies don’t know how to build products. And the result are overdeveloped products with inflated prices and features that are paid for and not used. In short, they do not add value, so we are back to square one. Phil Fersht from HFS has discussed this in depth when he mentioned the need to shift from a Software-as-a-Service approach to a Services-as-Software paradigm. This shift begins with the people who create the product.
They understand their industry inside and out, but building a product requires a completely different skill set. Many waste years and millions of dollars trying to develop a product from scratch—only to fail.
Hit the Ground Running
So, don’t start from scratch. Instead of building everything from the ground up, companies can use PROCESIO to develop process-driven products quickly and efficiently.
When companies build from scratch, they often overcomplicate things. They focus too much on the how (scalability, infrastructure, pipelines, etc.) instead of the what and why (delivering value to customers). PROCESIO eliminates unnecessary complexity by allowing businesses to:
- Focus on what their product should do and why it matters.
- Avoid getting bogged down in unnecessary development work.
- Deliver solutions faster and at a lower cost.
Stop Selling Time, Start Selling Value
Traditional consulting models are built around selling hours. The more time a project takes, the more money they make. This creates perverse incentives that prioritize billing over efficiency.
Instead, companies need to rethink their approach:
- Stop focusing on the “how”—the complex processes, long timelines, and detailed technical roadmaps.
- Start focusing on the “what” and “why”—the real value they’re delivering to customers.
By leveraging platforms like PROCESIO, companies can create products without the overhead of full-scale software development. This allows them to shift their revenue model to one that is recurring, scalable, and aligned with client needs.
Speed and responsiveness when creating and fine-tuning a product are key to the Services-as-Software approach: if we focus on the outcome, the how is noise: only the what and the why matter: what the client needs, and why they need it.
Final Thoughts
The world of consulting and implementation is shifting. Companies that cling to outdated models of time-based billing and rigid planning will struggle to stay competitive. The future belongs to those who can align their interests with their clients and focus on delivering real, recurring value.
By embracing a value-based approach and leveraging tools like PROCESIO, businesses can move away from inefficiencies and create products that truly matter, products created under the Services-as-Software paradigm, in which integration, scalability and outcomes are the currency.
So, the next time you’re planning a project or building a product, ask yourself: What do I want to achieve, and why?
For the how, we’ve already created a solution.
