Project Strategy

This book is currently under review, more details will be added when available

Tired of hearing about change and how your project is implementing it, but have no idea how to make it happen? ADKAR is the gold standard process to follow to help make that happen. This, and a little leadership, will get you ahead of the pack.

Why do some changes fail while others succeed?

How can you make sense of the many tools and approaches for managing change?

How can you lead change successfully, both in your personal life and professional career?

Excellent project managers are relationship builder both with the project team and the stakeholders. You need to continually build those skills and build trust.

Leadership is an art. As a project manager you need to become a better leader. You will not find that in any single book or class. You need to learn, study and practice. It helps you develop tools to better understand the difficult situations you face daily.

Since its original publication in 2000, Leadership and Self-Deception has become a word-of-mouth phenomenon. Its sales continue to increase year after year, and the book ’s popularity has gone global, with editions now available in over twenty languages.

Through a story everyone can relate to about a man facing challenges on the job and in his family, the authors expose the fascinating ways that we can blind ourselves to our true motivations and unwittingly sabotage the effectiveness of our own efforts to achieve success and increase happiness.

As a project manager, you are all about selling and persuasion. If you are not good at it, you better learn now. This book focuses on communicating in a way to get people to react to you.

Setting up meetings with corporate decision makers has never been harder. It's almost impossible to get them to pick up the phone. They never return your calls. And if you do happen to catch them, they blow you off right away.

It's time to stop making endless cold calls or waiting for the phone to ring. In today's crazy marketplace, new sales strategies are needed to penetrate these big accounts.

Discover how to:

Target accounts where you have the highest likelihood of success.
• Find the names of prospects who can use your offering.
• Create breakthrough value propositions that capture their attention.
• Develop an effective, multi-faceted account-entry campaign.
• Overcome obstacles and objections that derail your sale efforts.
• Position yourself as an invaluable resource, not a product pusher.
• Have powerful initial sales meetings that build unstoppable momentum.
• Differentiate yourself from other sellers.

Process is at the core of any business. It makes work predictable, repeatable, and transferable. Without it we cannot scale our businesses. However, process can be a bane to making progress. Processes that work for a $10 million company have difficulties supporting a $30 million company. Trying to scale them to a $300 million company will not only fail but not address the issues that larger companies have that were never dreamt of in a smaller organization. Processes need to be discarded, revamped, and built—all of that without creating an overburdening bureaucracy.

Anytime you need to go someplace, you first have to know where you are. Processes are never static and your company's current state is probably far from where you think it is. Hence, the first step is mapping out you company's current state followed by defining the future state. This is more than a logical map of the process; it must also include physical maps. Whether your process is solely to provide a service (say, website development) or physical (say, manufacturing) there are logistical issues that complicate the process flow. Without fully understanding those nuances, future state processes will not reach the desired efficiencies.

For more information about process mapping fill out the form to the left and we will get in touch with you.

Every project has its heroes. I am not talking about the pompous grandstanders selfishly getting their fingers into every process in order to gain fame. I am talking about the people that really get the work done. Toiling tirelessly to complete their tasks and move the project forward. Below is a profile of seven of them. I have chosen them because they represent agility, communication, responsiveness, and cooperation. These are the traits discussed in my last article.

Few would question that executives are responsible for ensuring projects are aligned with the corporate strategy. They also need to ensure these initiatives remain in line with these goals as business conditions change. To achieve this, they have to be engaged with the project when it starts and maintain that context throughout its life cycle. This requires more than ensuring the project maintains its scope, schedule, and budget; projects must deliver value. Too many projects start with the inspirational support of upper management, but as the project (or company) drifts, the executives have long since disengaged from the project and are unable to straighten out the misalignment. This wastes company resources and hinders the company's ability to deliver.

A few weeks ago, I set out to write a post on the comparison of various organizational change management (OCM) methodologies and realized that would be a disservice to my readers. It would simply drag you down the path of implementation while failing to focus you on building the foundation. The pressure was too much and I have relented to numerous requests on making that comparison. The caveat is that juxtaposing these models is not comparing different varieties of oranges or even apples and oranges; we are surely comparing the peel to the fruit they contain. Hence, comparing methodologies like Kotter's model (the peel), Prosci's ADKAR (the core), and General Electric's Change Acceleration Process (the whole fruit) need a different approach.

Vision, honesty, and transparency: three key traits of an organization that can guarantee project success. This was summed up in last week's interview with Tom Cox, the host of Blog Talk Radio's Tom on Leadership program. His audience, primarily from the C-Suite, is keen to understand how troubled projects are a reflection of their organization's overall health. Projects are, after all, the proverbial canaries in our organization's coalmine. Projects stop performing because there is trouble in the organization.