Utility Technology Project Success Series - How to Avoid Common Pitfalls that Put Projects at Risk
Before the Red Flags Fly: Spotting Early Signs of Project Drift
“Everything was going great, until it wasn’t.”
In utility and grid tech projects, failure rarely arrives all at once. It starts small: a missed check-in, a vague deliverable, a milestone that gets “pushed.” And while some drift is normal, pattern recognition is everything. Left unchecked, these early signals become full-blown derailments. Quiet indicators often matter more than the loud ones. Here are six signs your project might be veering off track—and how to intervene early.
In utility and grid tech projects, failure rarely arrives all at once. It starts small: a missed check-in, a vague deliverable, a milestone that gets “pushed.” And while some drift is normal, pattern recognition is everything. Left unchecked, these early signals become full-blown derailments. Quiet indicators often matter more than the loud ones. Here are six signs your project might be veering off track—and how to intervene early.
1. Decision-Making Slows Down
- If teams are hesitating or deferring key choices, it often points to misalignment or confusion upstream. Projects thrive on momentum. When decision latency sets in, it’s time to revisit roles, scope, or the clarity of shared goals.
- For the project team, this is the time to ensure that the owners of the project are those that have the most at personal stake in its success. They need to be supported in making decisions that are timely and well informed. They also need to have the right information at the right time.
- Well-intentioned team members may be making suggestions that aren’t strictly needed for the scope that’s been defined, making the project more complex and requiring ever more analysis to make sure the suggestions don’t have unintended consequences. Project teams should simplify wherever possible, and save enhancements for later, when incrementalism is the right approach.
- Decisions that cross departments need to have a key tiebreaker. This may be an agreement between two leaders, a person higher in the hierarchy, or a small panel of judges. The important part is that there are no deadlocks in decision making and that the tiebreakers are available and well informed to weigh in on important decisions.
2. Status Updates Get Softer (or Go Silent)
When updates shift from clear metrics to general sentiments like “we’re making progress”, that’s your cue to dig deeper. Silence can also signal stakeholder disengagement or team fatigue. Project leaders should ask penetrating questions such as “how is progress measured on this topic?”, “When will we know that we are done with this activity?”, or “If I were to ask the team members how confident they are that this will be done on time, what will I hear?”
A great technique we’ve used in the past is called a “leader’s test”. A project leader is tasked with asking 3 random team members working on an aspect of the project what the goal of their deliverable is, and how it will be validated. The lead for that activity knows that the test is coming and is responsible for preparing their team members accordingly. When the leader conducts the test, the more fidelity and agreement within the team there is, the better the result of the test. The more disagreement, equivocation and lack of specifics the leader hears the more the test indicates that communication isn’t working effectively within the project team.
3. Milestones Slide without Re-assessment
One reschedule is a timeline adjustment. Two or three without a scope review? That’s a risk signal. Slippage should trigger not just calendar changes, but resource and impact conversations.
Too often, schedule delays are accepted without challenge. Of course, one cannot wish their way into success, but a conversation and some investigation can uncover alternatives, adjustments to approach, or even team members who can contribute that may not be on the radar of those responsible for a delay. When timelines slip to the right, it’s time for the team and organization to rally together to help. Often there are others who would love to be involved and help but haven’t yet been asked.
If time is slipping across the project, or there’s a culture of lateness, deeper issues may be at work and warrant investigation. Do the team members feel afraid to fail? Maybe clearer expectations of success will give them the confidence needed to move forward. Is the team serially overcommitting? Let’s find out why and work to resolve those issues. Are the vendors being held accountable? This may be a “squeaky wheel” situation, where increased visibility and priority can help our vendor’s teams get the support they need to meet critical milestones.
4. People Start Protecting Turf
When collaboration gives way to defensiveness, it usually means stress is rising—and priorities are diverging. This is often cultural, not just technical. Addressing it requires active facilitation, not just more meetings.
Bringing impacted teams together to share their perspectives can have big rewards. Often, we are so focused on the world we can see and feel that we aren’t aware of the perspectives and needs of others. Teams may be protecting themselves from threats that are extremely unlikely or, conversely, taking on TOO much responsibility and more than they can control. Hearing each other out in a productive, purposeful team session can increase trust and encourage vulnerability. It can even surface solutions that would never have emerged otherwise.
Take the time to have these conversations, celebrate those who are willing to contribute with vulnerability and reward those who overcome obstacles by putting aside their own concerns in favor of the success of the whole. When you find success, take the time to ask the team members involved why, and use those insights when dealing with similar obstacles between team members.
5. Scope Starts Shifting Sideways
Scope creep rarely announces itself. It arrives through “small adds” that snowball. If your backlog is growing faster than delivery, it’s time to revisit the original value proposition and make hard calls.
The hardest part of these small additions is that they often seem simple and low risk to the person making the addition. They might feel like they have a good relationship with a person who would benefit, and it’s all the same. The problem is that each of these “adds” increases complexity, takes time to test and validate, and creates a requirement that will need to be maintained and upkept for years to come.
According to Pendo.io 80% of the features in Saas products are never or rarely used. Scope control starts with clear accountability for the overall project and increases to functionality must be explicitly approved by project leadership. Team members need to hold each other accountable to unasked for improvements or additional scope. Many times, the best approach is to focus the team on what’s desired by celebrating on-time delivery of specified requirements that are of very high quality. When properly incented, the team will defend against scope that stands in the way of timely, complete, and defect-free solutions.
6. No One's Talking About End Users
Projects lose altitude when the focus shifts solely to technology and timelines. Keeping end-user outcomes in view helps teams make better decisions when trade-offs arise.
Amazon’s “Working Backwards” method starts with “Putting customers at the heart of your business”. After all, how would utilities survive without customers or members? Ultimately, those that pay the bills are the very reason for an organization to exist. When we’re able to keep the customers’ interests top of mind, we gain clarity and purpose. A customer leader we worked with would sometimes say “don’t confuse yourself for the customer, but don’t be afraid to know the customer better than they know themselves.”
Think about how the customer is integrated into your project. How are their needs kept top of mind? Almost every utility touts the importance of safe, reliable, affordable and increasingly clean energy. How do those factors show up in your specific project? Certainly, affordability can apply to almost any effort a utility undertakes. Find ways to communicate and highlight the specific impact on those top-line imperatives.
What to Do When You Spot the Signs
Early detection only matters if it leads to early action. That might mean a facilitated reset, a project health check, or reclarifying the business case. The key is to create space for honest diagnosis—before reactive firefighting becomes the norm.The suggestions we’ve provided might be overwhelming. That’s ok, we’ve done this before. We’ve each been on the wrong end of the stick and our insights come from hard-fought wisdom gained from experience. By using Sage to augment your leadership team, your organization can benefit from our collective experience, delivering better projects that transcend “on time, on scope, on budget” to drive your organization forward in the energy journey.
Want to know what your project’s early signals are telling you? Let’s talk.