Big Picture Project Management

Craig is based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and has worked with ProjectManagement.com for the last six years developing the various HEADWAY processes (Project, Change and Portfolio). He has hosted a series of webinars and is a business intelligence subject matter expert.

  Strategy  

I recently came across a person who was excited about some recent developments in her workplace. She was moving to an electronic form to capture customer requirements. Before, when her sales group was looking at putting together a customer quote, they would use a paper form to capture the customers’ requirements. At some point in time down the road, her group would then enter that information into MS Word and move on to the next step. The solution they were building was to capture that information right in Word using an electronic form. No more paper! The excitement in her voice was palpable. From her perspective, this was a huge leap forward for her and her group. I congratulated her and wished her well.

However, as I was walking away, I was shaking my head for two reasons. First, I thought the solution they were using was very limiting, as I know that we have advanced beyond Word-based data capture solutions. More importantly, however, I was challenged by the sense that the solution that was being implemented here was being done in isolation to the rest of the sales cycle. Her group was looking to solve their paper problem, but they were not looking at really solving their data capture issues.

At some point in time, someone would still have to take this sales data and transcribe it into their sales-tracking database. This would take more time. If her group …

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