Agility Isn’t Free

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Agile  

Let’s forget about projects for a moment and think about our domestic lives. We all have financial commitments to ourselves and our families that we have to plan for: rent or mortgage payments, utility bills, groceries, insurance, car payments or transit costs.

We have to try and ensure that the money coming in each month is sufficient to cover all of those costs. If we are lucky, we also have a little bit left over to put toward a larger potential purchase in the future—a vacation, a new car, home improvements.

We also try to make sure that we have some kind of emergency fund for unexpected costs when an appliance breaks down, the car needs repairs, or in the event that our income is interrupted as a result of a job loss or similar disruption.

It’s not always easy to achieve, and there isn’t always a simple way to adjust those costs without feeling the impact elsewhere. For example, we can lower energy costs with a new energy efficient furnace or air conditioner, or by upgrading our windows. But all of those come with an upfront cost—potentially quite a large one.

That means that we have to make sacrifices elsewhere—perhaps forgoing a vacation, cutting back on entertainment, or otherwise limiting aspects of discretionary expenditure. This allows us to have sufficient funds available for those larger projects aimed at lowering the…

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