Todd Williams
Strategic Alignment: The Key To Project Success
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Project success rates for many companies and government organizations are dismally low, yet executives never seem to look at the big picture. They continue to make adjustments in the way projects are run by addressing isolated problems. However, projects are part of a much larger system and should be addressed in that context. To do that, companies must define how their strategic plan will use people, projects, and technology to achieve their goals. This paper discusses one approach to make this happen.
Transforming Project Managers Into Project Leaders
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Project management has been accepted in many businesses as a discipline critical for continued growth. To improve project performance, companies have levied rules on how projects should be run, defined common reporting requirements for all projects, and pooled and shared their project management resources. Even with these functions, projects still struggle to meet the needs of the customer. In order to improve project outcomes, the way in which they are managed must change. Project managers must become leaders, paying more attention to soft skills, managing their stakeholders, and identifying solutions to organizational issues that are limiting project success. The following paper discusses techniques developed by the author to address these needs and improve project success rates.
Vision To Value: Creating Successful Projects Using Leadership
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Value: Rather than scope, schedule, and budget, value is the lynch-pin of project success. Although the former three constraints are key factors in project success, there is no guarantee that meeting these constraints will result in a positive outcome. Instead constantly tracking the value of the project and making adjustments to the triple constraints to attain sufficient value is critical. Arguably this is the project managers most critical deliverable in the project. It requires significant insight into the project’s customer and a thorough understanding of their needs versus their wants. Project managers have to be leaders (leading subordinates, leaders, and customers), be able to assign priorities based on a critical, objective view.
Challenges In Executive Project Sponsorship
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eCameron took a serious look at project sponsorship by conducting a series on non-scientific interviews. Initially the focus was the healthcare industry. As patterns started to emerge, however, others outside of that industry expressed serious interest. To address that interest and better understand the larger issue we expanded the interviews to outside healthcare. Candid and confidential interviews were conducted with project related personnel including executives, sponsors, project managers, and Project Management Office (PMO) managers. In summary:
- Sponsorship is an issue in all business domains.
- Good sponsorship is an essential component in creating successful projects.
- Many issues are pervasive across industries.
- Sponsors need to work with project managers to design a successful project outcome.
- Sponsor roles are neither properly defined nor supported.
This white paper presents the results of the research and highlights areas where organizations need to improve to change their project success rates.
Your CRM Implementation Is Going To Fail
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) implementations fail at an alarming rate. For the last fourteen years, numerous independent parties have come up with the same dismal statistics. In fact, your implementation probably will not meet your goals either. The graphic above does not bode well for anyone heading out on that journey. To be sure, configuring the software is significantly more difficult that it appears at first glance. As much as one wants to blame Salesforce, Microsoft, or some other software vendor, though, the trouble lies much closer to home.
For the astute onlookers it is easy to tell when the implementation is going the awry. It is the argument over who is going to drive the project—IT or Sales and Marketing. Unfortunately, these are the wrong people to have in the discussion.
IT: We Don't Need No Stinking Leadership
I have never posted email marketing results, because... well, let's face it... it is kind of tacky. Now and then, however, there is a story to be told. In my opinion, this set of statistics is a little over-the-top in what it shows. I can only see one way to interpret it other than Information Technology "leaders" simply do not care about leadership.
To understand how I can make such a brash statement, you need a little background...
Organization Change Management for Project Teams Workshop
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Projects are never a success when they are delivered—their product must be adopted to declare success. Whether you are delivering a process for HR, creating new model of cell phone for your customers, or implementing a new ERP system for your company, if they do not see value in the output of your project, it is a failure. Most project teams, however, are focused on maintaining scope, schedule, and budget, they are far removed from the end-user, and they have little concept on how to persuade someone to use what they are developing. The fact of the matter is, though, that if they are the first people involved in the making a tangible product that their customers can use, adapt, and enhance to create value.
Organization Change Management for Project Teams helps your project manager, their teams, and their stakeholders:
Testimonials: Keynotes, Webinars, and Workshops
“He did a fantastic job. In three and a half hours he not only familiarized our people with the psychology of change, but also walked them through how the proposed changes for next year will impact them and our clients.” Christine Herb, VP Professional Services |
Organization Change Management: What Would You Do?
"Our Changes just don't stick!" That is the cry of too many executives exasperated by the waste of resources trying to get people in their organization to adopt new processes. A major portion of the reason is the lack of an organization change management (OCM) mentality in the organization. This is no more apparent than in the method in which initiatives and their constituent projects are executed. Lack of end-user involvement and adoption accountability are at the core of this failure.
Executive Sponsorship: What Would You Do?
Few will disagree that sponsorship is critical to project success, yet how many times to you hear, “Our project sponsor is not engaged!” Our research shows that 80% of all PMs will tell you that engagement is the primary issue they face with the executive sponsor. Even more serious, when discussing the topic with executives, a very large majority will say that consistent, high-quality sponsorship is the number-one problem they see in executing initiatives successfully.
Project Rescue Blog Posts
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Tales of an Expert Witness: Sex, Lies, and Video Tape (Part II) Written on Wednesday, 02 December 2015 06:30Trust relationships, certifications, and standards sound like such a safe harbor. These sound like such great words in a proposal or statement of work. How could you possibly go wrong…
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Tales of an Expert Witness: Sex, Lies, and Video (Part I) Written on Friday, 01 August 2014 00:00The subpoena shows up at the front desk and the call comes to you to pick it up. That nauseating feeling in your gut is the prelude to a long…
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The 6 Ps of Public Sector Project Failure: Profit, Periodicity, Politics, Passion, Press, and Pay Written on Friday, 30 May 2014 00:00"The government is incapable of running projects. Simply put, their miserably high failure rate proves that government should be out of the project management business." There are plenty of examples…
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Case Study: Division Of Unemployment Assistance, Massachusetts/Deloitte Written on Sunday, 30 March 2014 00:00In May 2007, the Massachusetts Division of Unemployment Assistance (DUA) signed a contract with Bearing Point, Inc. to modernize the State’s unemployment processing system. The project was called the DUA…
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Case Study: $250 Million Failure, Who Are You Going To Sue? Written on Sunday, 30 March 2014 00:00In order to comply with the Affordable Care Act, the State of Oregon made the decision to build its own Health Insurance Exchange (ORHIX). An online portal to allow applicants…
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Consultants Cheat Written on Sunday, 25 March 2012 00:00"We can fix this project ourselves." I hear that line all the time. And, of course, you can. It will just be a lot slower and more expensive because consultants…
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Decision Makers, Shakers, and Fakers Written on Sunday, 12 June 2011 00:00Decisions, deshmisions, what is the big deal? Anyone can make a decision! Hardly. After years of working with ineffective initiatives and consternated companies, I have a healthy respect for the…
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Passionately Dispassionate Written on Sunday, 29 May 2011 00:00People routinely ask me the question, "What do you do when you find yourself on a project that is a hopeless failure?" It was raised again a few weeks ago…
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Leading Without Authority Written on Sunday, 27 March 2011 00:00Leadership is more than leading the people reporting to you. Too often, you need to lead people over which you lack any authority. The absence of hierarchical advantage adds a…
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The Consultant's Lore Written on Sunday, 16 January 2011 00:00"Why is it that when you get hired you are no longer the expert?" A chuckle rippled through the audience; however, the woman asking the question was serious. I turned…
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The Snake Pit, Taking the Poison Out of Technical Debt Written on Sunday, 27 June 2010 00:00Projects build in technical debt and maintenance groups remove it—if your organization has a maintenance group. Technical debt accrues in any product, whether or not it has a technical component.…
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Five (more) Stupid Management Decisions on Failing Projects Written on Sunday, 20 June 2010 00:00A few weeks ago, I posted an article on five of the ten stupidest decisions management had done on troubled projects, as promised, here are the other five. Although these…
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