Solidify, Amplify, Multiply

Beth Spriggs' professional career began in information technology in 1999. As a certified PMP with over a decade of project management experience, she has combined her love for tech and project management by focusing her career on managing technology projects and portfolios. She is author of The Project Manager's Little Book of Cheats.

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Topics: Lessons Learned, Requirements Management, ProjectsAtWork

How many of your projects stagnate before they ever really get going? How many kick off with grand expectations but fail to deliver even minimal benefits? Here is a back-to-basics framework for starting and scaling your work, be it a process, product, system or entire business.

Imagine a large freight train, 15 cars long, each car filled with gravel. Next to that heavy train is a small car. Both are at a standstill and gearing up to go. A race is about to begin — granted a very unfair race, but a race just the same. Picture as the car quickly speeds off while the train slowly begins to chug and inches along as it strains to get going. There’s no contest. The bigger something is, the harder it is to get moving. The bigger the project or process, the harder it can be to get moving.

I’ve seen projects get stalled at the research phase for months at time, paralyzed because the project was so large that the project manager didn’t know how to get it off the ground. I’ve also seen systems that got off the ground and then stagnated. No improvements were made, no lessons learned applied, no care was taken to anticipate and plan for future needs as the work changes.

Now you find yourself responsible for a project, process, or product and you’re ready to get moving. How do you get it off the ground? And from there how do you get it up to full …

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