Webinars for Avoiding Project Failure

eCameron provides a variety of keynotes and seminars for your company or organization. They are broken into three groups:

1. Business Advancement Series – addressing business leadership topics from strategic planning to implementation as they relate to running projects successfully.
2. Visualizing Change Series – change management and the challenges in adopting new processes.
3. Back From Red^TM Series – focusing on topics that are directly associated with properly running projects in any organization.

Estimates for the annual cost of project failure are as high as two trillion dollars a year. The rates for projects being at risk are in the 60-70% range, and a quarter of all project's problems are so bad they are simply canceled prior completion. Preferably, all projects will run according to plan. However, moving from a 60% failure rate to 0% is unrealistic. To improve success rates, organizations must first understand what it is that makes their projects fail. Reasons range from methodology to human failure to lack of executive commitment. Taking a systems approach to analyzing projects uncovers all the factors that are contributing to the failure.

Leaders define the vision. A business turns vision into value. It still takes a team of executives, managers, project managers, and individual contributors to drive the projects that build the capabilities to transform businesses. Ergo, projects are the enablers for turning vision into value.

The Vision to Value keynote is geared toward helping executives, finance leaders, technology leaders, and project managers understand what is required to enable the organization to share and stay focused on the company's goals, hence, reducing waste, increasing productivity, and decreasing waste.

Executives build PMOs to ensure people follow a process. Companies require project management certification. Project managers have religious battles over agile and waterfall. Mistakes occur and managers implement more processes to prevent their reoccurrence.  Yet there is another philosophy that says this is the wrong direction completely. This ideology feels that people need more independence and less bureaucracy. The people who follow this think that people need more leadership training. People or Process, as the name implies, looks directly at these arguments and the role of people versus process in a project's or an organization’s success or failure. 

The ability to quickly deliver initiatives that make breakthroughs in the business is the differentiator of truly successful organizations. It takes a blame-free culture, highly accountable, talented, and innovative people, and money. Nothing is free. However, even with this powerful combination, project success rates are dismal. Failure rate estimates range from 40-75% of projects are over budget, late, or fail to deliver the required functionality. There are many actions leaders can take to minimize this, but at times it is just part of being in a world where customers want constant innovation.

We all know that ethics plays a large role in business. We see the challenge almost daily making headline news. It does not just pertain to the people at the top of a company but to everyone inside the organization. Ethics and accountability are at the core of what it takes to be a leader. This keynote presents real situations that occurred asking for audience input (via Mentimeter) on how to handle the situation. They are also told the outcome of the actual situation. These are not sanitized, simple issues. 

People often fail to realize how many actions in work and our personal lives rely on negotiation. It could be negotiating a raise, setting up conditions about using a resource, determining a task's scope, or adjusting a delivery date. We do some form of negotiation daily. Even though we learn to negotiate at just about the same time that we learn to communicate, we rarely understand the science and art behind it. By establishing a process around negotiation, we maximize our chances for success. A process ensures that we understand the wants and needs of the person on the other side of the table. 

Many organizations have only one methodology for running projects. However, nearly all organizations perform a variety of projects—deploying hardware, developing new products, changing internal processes, and running custom projects for customers. Some methodologies are much better for specific styles of projects. Therefore, organizations need a portfolio of processes that matches their portfolio of projects and their culture. Phasing, critical chain, agile all have valuable attributes that can be applied in specific areas.

The fate of a project is often sealed long before the first person is assigned or charters, contracts, or SOWs are written.  Experience with auditing dozens of projects and doing root cause analysis projects has shown that corporate decisions, not project decisions, have a very larger effect. This presentation, designed for executives, PMO managers, and senior project managers, focuses on a number of techniques learned while recovering projects that greatly improve the chances for success. It introduces the concept of guidance teams that get involved with the project at the customer inception stage and follows the project and team through to its completion.