Better Business

As a senior program/project manager I spend most of my professional career in international program/project management, focusing on distributed projects in multi-cultural environments. People I work with recognize me for my ability to assess a situation quickly and define adequate and pragmatic actions to bring projects back on track. My style of management can be characterized as can-do, a pragmatic approach focusing on delivery.

  Governance   Portfolio Management  

These days, most projects exist because of a supporting business case that describes the benefits in terms of reducing internal costs, reduction of resources, improvement of processes or by improving services to the customers by improving the help desk, providing better service, improved product quality and increased functionality for self-service. The benefits can be categorized in two main areas: business- or competitor-related.

The business focus encompasses all benefits relating to your own strength, like new product support, improvement of internal processes...in other words, mainly focussing on increasing the margin on a product by reducing costs.

The competitor focus encompasses those benefits that relate to an improvement for the product which is noticeable to the customer. The priority of benefits and requirements in this area will be driven by what the market is offering, or how to distinguish from the competitors. In this case, the focus is on increasing the turnover and the willingness of the customer to buy the product instead of your competitor's. This principle can also be applied to non-profit and governmental organizations.

The driver behind reducing costs or increasing the turnover is increasing the profitability of the project. However, the choice to choose one or the other (or a mixture) will result …

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