Teachable Moments: The Necessity of Socializing BPI Projects

Gina Abudi is the President of Abudi Consulting Group and a blogger at GinaAbudi.com. She works with Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000 organizations in the areas of leadership, project management and process improvement. Gina's book "Best Practices for Managing BPI Projects: Six Steps to Success" will be published by J Ross Publishing on March 15, 2015. Gina is a professional speaker and member of the Global Speaker's Federation. She speaks on the same topics in which she consults and offers training workshops.

 

Teachable moments are formed when you have done something--regardless of the outcome--and learned from the experience. Learning makes us better at what we do and provides a great opportunity to develop others and sharpen skills. We’ve compiled our best Teachable Moments from our community members for you to learn from and share with other project managers.

Many years ago while managing my very first business process improvement project, I learned the absolute need to socialize such projects long before they are launched within the organization.

The objective of the BPI project was to evaluate processes for two departments that were going to be merging. It was likely that organizational restructuring would occur as part of the project’s end result. Approximately 60 individuals were directly involved and would be impacted by this initiative. These were the key stakeholders. In my initial conversation with the sponsor, I asked about taking a few days to share information about the project and get to know the key stakeholders. I was told “no.” I did not push back (first lesson learned).

There was definitely significant pressure from the sponsor to get the project moving sooner rather than later. This was due to a number of reasons--the most important being that the company was merging with another organization and this project had to be …

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