Managing just one project or change is great. It allows us to focus. on our key stakeholders, the team and the change goals. But, if you’re good at your job, chances are you’ll be asked to pick up another project, … Read the rest ...
Category Archives: Case Studies
9 Factors to Ensure Strategic Project Alignment
Most organizations face demands for project funding and resourcing well in excess of affordable supply. Ensuring those demands align with organizational strategies and priorities just complicates the decision-making process. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a simple approach that … Read the rest ...
Restart the Project
Projects are one time entities. Project managers usually only have one chance to get each project right. There are no do-overs in the real world. That offers an exciting career, but with the attendant pressures, issues and risks. Wouldn’t it … Read the rest ...
Seven Rules for Successful Outsourcing
These days, outsourcing is a viable option for many non-core and even core corporate functions. Unfortunately, outsourcing initiatives can come with significant risks. If not managed effectively, the expected financial rewards will diminish or disappear entirely and previously well running … Read the rest ...
The Need to Confront Executive Edicts
Sometimes, a senior executive will proclaim an aggressive target hoping it will act as an incentive for a project team. However, that target needs to have some element of achievability to have any value. An outrageous demand, untempered by rational … Read the rest ...
Four Lessons from Being Acquired
Mergers and acquisitions seem to be a fact of corporate life. In a post on CNBC.com entitled 2013 The Year of M&A? Beating the Odds of Failure, the authors state “Experts such as the Wharton School of the University … Read the rest ...
Five Project Recovery Fundamentals
For a variety of reasons, a project can lose its way and end up in trouble. Challenges can arise from a lack of key stakeholder engagement or a change in a key stakeholder, from poor oversight, faulty assumptions, bad communications, … Read the rest ...
Five Stakeholder Priorities
Being a project stakeholder means being actively engaged throughout the course of a change. In fact, lack of ongoing stakeholder engagement is one of the most common causes of project failure. That’s doubly true for sponsors. Absentee sponsorship is a … Read the rest ...
The Champion’s Dilemma
We value individual initiative aimed at delivering a solution. But sometimes, when other people or organizations are affected by that target solution, individual initiative is better first aimed at collaboration, not invention. That’s what I call “The Champion’s Dilemma”.
In … Read the rest ...
If in Doubt, Pilot
When an organization encounters a pressing problem or opportunity, there’s usually a demand to deliver the solution quickly. And, very often, the expected solution is the complete answer to the identified challenge, with all the bells and whistles. Unfortunately, this … Read the rest ...