George FreemanThought Leader | Author | Architect| Florida, United States
The perspective you take on this question is yours to choose. For instance, you may respond in the context of [1] what would benefit your practice the most, or [2] what would benefit the project management profession the most, or somewhere in between.
If someone has already stated your “top problem to solve,” then state that fact and choose your runner-up problem.
If you are inclined, please provide the reasoning behind your problem choice.
In my perspective, it would be to enhance communication and collaboration across teams seamlessly. By streamlining communication channels, fostering transparency, and automating routine tasks, we could empower project managers to focus more on strategic planning and problem-solving, ultimately leading to smoother project execution and success. Saving Changes...
Mine is pretty simple to explain but hard to implement: accepting more work into a system than it can efficiently and effectively complete. Or, put another way, cut your coat according to your cloth. When leadership teams neglect to do this, it generates a slew of evils including multitasking, reduced product/service quality, increased lead time and reduced morale.
Kiron
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1 reply by George Freeman
May 20, 2024 10:26 PM
George Freeman
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Hi Kiron,
It’s a catch-22:
[A] After conducting due diligence with stakeholders, project leadership presents the business need, proposed solution, value proposition, and project constructs to executive management for approval.
[B] Executive management commends the effort but draws concern to the ROI projections, demand for business resources, projected budget, and timeline, and let’s not forget about past project performance.
[C] Tentative approval is provided subject to executive prerogatives that maintain the project’s scope but artificially constrain time, cost, and resource allocations.
[D] The choice is made abundantly clear through the luxury of executive speech: walk out that door without a project or restructure within the “not to be mentioned” constraints—your choice.
It is “hard to implement:”
So, let me ask, did project leadership “accept more work,” or did they “fall into alignment?”
Should we state that the organization’s project’s maturity is at fault for this situation, or is this “part of the game” that (we should all recognize) we signed up for?
NOTE: I strongly agree with your waiving of the magic wand. I just had to add some A, B, C, and D commentary to add some insight that someone told me once upon a time, as nothing like this has ever happened to me. :-)
George
Saving Changes...
George FreemanThought Leader | Author | Architect| Florida, United States
May 20, 2024 7:23 AM
Replying to Kiron Bondale
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George -
Mine is pretty simple to explain but hard to implement: accepting more work into a system than it can efficiently and effectively complete. Or, put another way, cut your coat according to your cloth. When leadership teams neglect to do this, it generates a slew of evils including multitasking, reduced product/service quality, increased lead time and reduced morale.
Kiron
Hi Kiron,
It’s a catch-22:
[A] After conducting due diligence with stakeholders, project leadership presents the business need, proposed solution, value proposition, and project constructs to executive management for approval.
[B] Executive management commends the effort but draws concern to the ROI projections, demand for business resources, projected budget, and timeline, and let’s not forget about past project performance.
[C] Tentative approval is provided subject to executive prerogatives that maintain the project’s scope but artificially constrain time, cost, and resource allocations.
[D] The choice is made abundantly clear through the luxury of executive speech: walk out that door without a project or restructure within the “not to be mentioned” constraints—your choice.
It is “hard to implement:”
So, let me ask, did project leadership “accept more work,” or did they “fall into alignment?”
Should we state that the organization’s project’s maturity is at fault for this situation, or is this “part of the game” that (we should all recognize) we signed up for?
NOTE: I strongly agree with your waiving of the magic wand. I just had to add some A, B, C, and D commentary to add some insight that someone told me once upon a time, as nothing like this has ever happened to me. :-)
The concern is not that projects are approved, but rather the phasing or pacing of them. We had a bad situation in one of the companies I worked with where every year they approved a slew of projects through a fairly rigorous business case process and when the new fiscal year began, each sponsor wanted to start their projects right away to be able to realize the expected benefits soon. Given that we never had sufficient staff to concurrently execute all these projects, you'd find projects getting out of the gates and almost immediately stalling. Things started to improve when we made it a requirement that the sponsor was able to confirm commitment of the core project team for the expected start date before approval to start would be granted. That, and building resource buffers (a la Goldratt) between the project assignments of high demand, low supply staff helped to reduce the churn.
