Strategic Initiative Management FAIL

 

As I’ve laid out in this month’s previous blogs, Strategic Management is the art of acquiring more market share, whereas Project Management is the science of executing project work so as to bring the effort in on-time, on-budget, and meeting all customer expectations concerning scope. And Asset Management is, well, just that (how previous business scholars have sold the management science world that it’s all about them is beyond me). Some so-called experts will assert that Strategic Management is just one more rung up the scalability ladder of PM, as in Project-to-Program-to-Portfolio-to-Strategic, but this is false, to an extent. Let me explain.

A strategic plan is an overarching structure, used to organize the more specific tactics. For example, if your strategy is to gain more market share by attracting more clients while keeping the ones you have satisfied, then the following tactics are called for:

• Create a product/project management office, or PMO (if you don’t have one already)
• Attract talented workers
• …while getting rid of the pretenders (need help identifying the real PM-types from these pretenders? I’ll take that up in subsequent blogs).
• Place a priority on the training budgets of the valid PM types.
• Develop a feedback communication stream from your customers (Customers, not “stakeholders,” no matter what your communications experts say).
• Ignore the accountants and risk managers. They do not help with this strategy.

Conversely, if you are given to taking recreational drugs while executing the duties of a Chief Executive Officer of an unfortunate organization, and have selected a strategy that calls for wasting resources while transferring the costs to your soon-to-be-ex customers under the guise of legitimate project management, then the following tactics are in order:

• Bring in high-level risk managers and analysts, and have them crawl over every aspect of the cost and schedule baselines. Insist on thorough documentation of their analyses, to include a risk management plan, risk register, Monte Carlo analysis, and the complete set of assumptions that gets you to an 80% confidence interval on the baselines.
• Hire communications experts, and have them “engage stakeholders.”
• Don’t forget the quality analysts, and their infernal fishbone diagrams with a “branch” for every activity in the WBS that could have been planned differently.
• Ask the risk managers to perform an analysis on having the quality people do the Hasegawa Diagram on each of the lowest-level items in the WBS index.
• Have the quality experts perform an analysis on the methods employed by the risk managers.
• Assign each of the previous two bullets their own Work Packages, and schedule their activities. Have your project controllers/schedulers ping them at the end of each month for their percent complete estimates.
• Arrange to have the risk managers and quality control specialists present their pre-kickoff findings at the same meeting. Sell tickets to help offset project costs.
• Arrange to have the communications specialists attend as well. Prep them by reminding them that all stakeholders’ opinions have value, and must not be shouted down or categorically rejected,
• …particularly when the other members of the Project Team tell the communications specialists that their ideas have no value, and should be categorically rejected.

The beauty of this approach is that, in those instances where your customer is convinced of the efficacy of risk, quality, and communication management practices, the fact that these members of the Project Team will probably be shouting at each other will only serve to support the notion that the appropriate level of (wasted) energy is being devoted to each of these approaches, and that the project in question is being “properly” managed. But as a way of increasing market share – i.e., Strategic Initiative Management – it’s not going to work.

No matter how much twisted fun it may be to see unfold.